For quite some time I held the viewpoint that the length of time for which a domain name is registered does help a website or blog achieve higher search rankings, particulalry on Google. In my mind I have often tried to trace the origins of this thought and, after performing a few searches, I have pinned down the original source as a patent filed by Google in October 2006.
This snippet is taken from a post about the patent:
According to Google, valuable domains are often paid for several years in advance while doorway or throwaway domains are rarely used for more than a year. To determine the value of a domain, Google records the following information:
the length of the domain registration (one year <-> several years)
the address of the web site owner, the admin and the technical contact
the stability of data and host company
the number of pages on a web site (web sites must have more than one page)
Google claims that they have a list of known bad contact information, name servers and IP addresses that helps them to find out whether a spammer is running a domain.
Every time I buy or renew a domain name a little reminder of this pops into my head, but it never forces me to register a domain for longer than I can afford at the time. This is despite the marketing tactics of domain registrars who encourage domain owners to purchase domains for anything up to 10 years at a time. They don’t always suggest that this will help with rankings, but it has been known.
A few days ago on Search Engine Land, Matt McGee published an article on this very subject. He doesn’t completely discount the idea of long term domain registrations being a beneficial tool for search engine rankings, but he does suggest that one year registrations might be a problem for some sites:
…if you build an iffy web site with iffy content and questionable links — in other words, if you look like part of the low-quality, spammy Internet neighborhood — a one-year registration just might matter.
Matt refers to three situations when Barry Schwartz, John Mueller and Matt Cutts (all from Google) have talked or written about the domain name issue:
John Mueller said:
A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates — how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time :-).
If domain name expiration dates were published for all domains, would the length of time for which a domain is purchased become part of the search algorithm? I would say it is quite likely. And would this be a good thing? I would say yes it would as it highlights the seriousness of the blog/website owners intentions.
