I was reading a forum post by Willie Crawford who is one of
my favorite Internet marketers. Willie brought up a point
that Google may favor ranking domains that have longer registration
periods. His source, a domain name registrar, stated the following:
"As part of Google's recent patent application, Google
made apparent its efforts to wipe out search engine spam,
stating:
'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.'
Domains registered for longer periods give the indication,
true or not, that their owner is legitimate. Google uses a
domain's length of registration when indexing and ranking
a Web site for inclusion in their organic search results.
To prove to everyone that your site is the real deal, register
for more than one year and increase your chances of boosting
your search ranking on Google."
Some domain name registrars are inclined to promote this position
because it may motivate their customers to increase the terms
of their domain registration, thereby increasing the profits
of the registrar.
That being said, I can also understand Google and other search
engines considering the term of a domain registration as a
small part of their algorithm used to determine free rankings
of a website in their search engine. It is the job of every
search engine to provide the most relevant search results
possible and it is often the website owners who have a long-term mindset
that are providing the most value to their visitors.
Aside from the search engines, I do know that some website
visitors also check how long a domain is registered as part
of their own personal due diligence to decide if they want
to do business with a company or not. Think about it... If
you are providing a service and your potential customer goes
to http://www.whois.net
and finds out that your domain expires in less than a year,
they might think you're a "fly-by-night" company
that won't be there when they need you and decide not to do
business with you.
All in all, I believe it's important to have a long-term mindset
when building your Internet business. If it helps you even
slightly to get a better search engine ranking or increase
the trust that potential customers have in your website, registering
a domain name for a few extra years is a sound investment.
Inspired by this insight myself, I just added 5 additional
years of registration do my Dotcomology.com domain which is
now currently set to expire in the year 2012. I plan to be
around until then and hopefully much longer. What about you?
Stone Evans is the author of "Dotcomology - The
Science of Making Money Online" and he wants you to know
that you shouldn't pay a dime for any ebook, marketing course,
software program or anything else until you've read the groundbreaking
document you can download free at: http://www.Dotcomology.com
