Understanding the Domain Age and Its Impact on Email Deliverability

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

In the digital world, an email domain’s age can be a significant factor in determining how trustworthy and legitimate the messages it delivers are. Oftentimes, email deliverability rates for the messages sent from the domains older than ten years are approximately thirty percent higher than for those sent from recently established domains.

What’s the Domain Age?

The “age” of a domain is the period of time it has been used for since it has been registered. WHOIS databases, which monitor and archive domain history, make the domain’s registration date publicly available. The domain’s age increases with each renewal.

The domain age and an email sending history often stand for significant determinants of the authenticity of emails coming from that domain for Internet service providers. The domain age is seen as an online “trust score” for the sender’s email address. Email servers tend to view older domains as more reliable because they have a longer history of activity to evaluate.

What Does the Domain Age Mean for SEO and Email Marketing?

The difference in how the domain age is valued in email marketing versus search engine optimization (SEO) determines the strategy of the domain maintenance and management.

For SEO, the domain age is not a major factor in success. Although the domain age may slightly increase the website’s authority and trust, it doesn’t take the leading role. More significance is given to technical elements like high-quality content, mobile optimization, and user experience. 

In email marketing, an established, trustworthy, and older site might offer obvious benefits. Email service providers tend to trust older email domains more, which frequently leads to improved deliverability rates and less spam filtering problems.

Does the Domain Age Impact Email Deliverability?

As mentioned above, the domain age influences email deliverability – the possibility that emails from a domain will end up in recipients’ Inboxes rather than their Spam folders. The domain age contributes to sender reputation with email service providers, which can be enhanced by a prolonged, active domain presence.

Older domains that have continuously adhered to best sender practices are more likely to be favored or even whitelisted by spam filters, which can increase deliverability and recipient engagement. 

A new email domain, on the other hand, can have trouble at first since it hasn’t gained the confidence or reputation with Internet service providers yet. Achieving high deliverability rates is extremely difficult for new domains. Mailbox providers frequently examine the messages coming from recently registered domains more meticulously when they have no history to evaluate, which raises the possibility that the emails may be marked as spam or never make it to Inboxes. 

Spam filters naturally view new domains as riskier because they haven’t had a chance to demonstrate dependability or adherence to recommended practices. Furthermore, any negative signals – such as high bounce rates or early spam complaints – can damage their reputation, making it more challenging to regain credibility.

Domain Age as Part of Domain Reputation

When deciding whether to completely block, send it to Spam, or deliver an email coming from a certain domain, Internet service providers give domain reputation a lot of weight. While a strong reputation raises the possibility that emails will reach their intended recipients, a bad reputation can seriously impede email communication efforts.

ISPs evaluate these parameters to determine an email domain reputation:

Email Domain Age

As mentioned above, the importance of a domain age for SEO and email marketing is evaluated differently. For email marketing and deliverability, the domain a brand sends all of the types of email communications from is in the focus. For instance, if a company’s website is https://company.com but their email communications are distributed on behalf of email.company.com, the latter domain’s age is considered by inbox providers to assess the sender reputation.

Email Volume

ISPs want to see a good volume of emails sent from a domain in order they can gauge its reputation. In particular, Google will only display the domain reputation data in the Postmaster Tools if there was sufficient email traffic from a domain within the last months. 

However, it is important to understand that a new domain needs to be warmed up. During a warmup stage, you start with a low number of emails and increase the volume slowly until you achieve the desired daily limit.

Sending Frequency

How often the domain sends emails is also noticed by ISPs. While steady email volumes are generally better welcomed by ISPs, sudden spikes and drops in email volume may indicate possible spam activity.

Recipient Engagement

Domain reputation is improved by positive receiver engagement, such as high open, click, reply, and forward rates. On the other hand, ignored messages are a signal of the user’s disinterest, which leads to a lower domain reputation.

User Reported Spam

Spam complaints might seriously harm domain reputation if they exceed a particular threshold. Thus, Google requires a daily spam reported rate to be below 0,1% and never reach 0,3%.

Email Content

Inbox providers evaluate the quality of email content by looking for spam-like elements such as over-capitalization, dirty HTML, hidden code, deceptive subject lines, or a bad text-to-image ratio. Reputation is positively impacted by well-written, pertinent content.

Email Authentication

SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) are important authentication standards. These protocols assist in confirming that the sending domain is authorized to transmit the email and that the content of the email is not altered while in transit. Therefore, the configuration of all of the authentication protocols is crucial for building and maintaining a good domain reputation.  

Blacklists

A domain reputation can be seriously harmed by the presence of a domain in DNS-based blacklists (DNSBLs) or Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBLs). These lists are used by ISPs to ban domains linked to malicious activity, such as spam or phishing.

How to Check the Age of a Domain

The age of a domain can be rapidly returned by a domain age checker tool. You can submit a domain name with the services like DupliChecker, Whatsmydns, SE Ranking, WebConfs, and they will return the information such as the domain’s registration date, and the duration of use.

The steps to check a domain age are:

1. Choose a domain age checker tool. 
2. Enter the domain name into the input box.
3. Click “Check”, “Analyze”, or “Submit” or a similar button to initiate the domain age lookup. 
4. View the results. The tool will display results that usually include the domain’s age and the initial registration date. Some tools may also show the domain’s last update date, and the expiration date.

How to Test Email Deliverability from a Domain

The reputation and deliverability from a domain can be easily verified in an email tester service like GlockApps. GlockApps provides seed-based email tests for anyone who wants to find out if their email campaigns are reaching the recipients and where the messages land – Inbox, Tabs, or Spam. Not only does the tool provide the information about email placements with various ISPs across the world, it only gives valuable insights about the sender’s reputation, blacklisting problems, authentication, and content issues. 

The steps to test email deliverability are:

1. Login to your account.
2. Navigate to Inbox Insight.
3. Click “Start Spam Test”.
4. Click “Start Manual Test”. 
5. Select the inbox providers for the test, click “Next.”
6. Copy the given id and paste it in the message that you will test.
7. Send the message to the given seed list.
8. Click “View Report.” 

You can test deliverability for all the domains you own and use for your email communications to understand the domain reputation and receive actionable tips to increase the Inbox placement ratio.

Conclusion

It takes a calculated approach to manage a domain depending on the goal it serves. For SEO, high quality content and good user experience are the priority while for email marketing, a solid sender reputation is in focus. It’s crucial for new domains to employ strategies like domain warming to build a reputation and adhere to best practices in email sending and list management to preserve a solid reputation over time. Whether your domain is new or aged, it is beneficial to monitor deliverability by using email testing tools like GlockApps Inbox Insight to spot the issues and deal with them as soon as they arise.