Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category - Beginner SEO

It has long been speculated that Google, along with other search engines, would someday start looking at the length of your domain registrations to determine how legitimate your site is.  Well, according to Godaddy, they are starting to do just that. About 6 months ago Google applied for a patent, which they do often, thats states “Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year”

According to Godaddy, and others, the length of your domain registration is now being used as an indicator of whether your site is SPAM or not. The longer your registration the bigger “potential boost” your site could get in the search engines.  Of course there is no way to know whether this is true or not. Google includes lots of ideas in their patents, half of which will never see it into one of their algorithms.

There are a few arguments why Godaddy would claim this to be true. The obvious one being that it helps them to increase their sales. So can you trust what they are saying?

I myself think that it would’nt hurt for the search engines to give a small boost to sites that are registered for more then 1 year, it makes sense. The implementation of this sort of ranking factor would indeed serve the main purpose of somewhat devaluing Spam sites, while it would do very little to hurt ligitimate sites, even if they werent buying multi year registrations.  There are still plenty of factors that will help legitimate sites outrank their spammy competitors.

If you are interested in seeing what Godaddy is saying about the subject, go through the registration process and only select 1 year. On the next page there is a section that talks about the benefits of multi year registrations, one of them being “Improve[d] search engine rankings”.  It has also been reported that if you call them they will use that as part of their sales pitch.

I dont know about you guys but I am definitly going to invest the small amount of cash to buy a few extra years of registrations for my most important domains. Why not?