Domain Name Registration Length
September 3rd, 2005 by YzabelThe article isn’t extremely recent, as it dates back to July of this year, but I found it useful to mention something I had already seen on other sites, during my first attempts at researching SEO tactics more efifciently: domain name registration length. This is especially valid for Google, in fact.
Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect the search results at Google? This question has come up recently and a lot of website owners have been wondering about it, especially since it was mentioned in a patent awarded to Google in April. According to the patent, “Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.” According to this statement in the patent, domains that expire in 10 years are more valuable and legitimate than domains that will expire in less than a year.
It can be an important detail to keep in mind, as determining for how long a domain name is registered is a way for Google to bust out spam sites, as opposed to legitimate sites which owners care about. And this is a key in the way your website will be indexed by the search engine.
Google, in general, is always looking for ways to weed out the bad (spammers) from the good (legitimate) websites. I suspect that they looked for a pattern among the good, legitimate websites and found that most good, legitimate websites have a commitment towards their business and their domain name-they register it for a long period of time. In other words, the theory behind all of this is that if you register a domain name for several years it shows Google that you’re committed to that domain name. If you register a domain name for 1 year then you’re not as committed to that domain name. A lot of spammers use “throw away” domain names and register them for only a year. So, Google uses the length of time that a domain is registered to determine whether the owner of that domain name is committed to it or not.
You can read the whole article by Bill Hartzer here.
