Today’s installment of my 30 Days To Better SEO series is going to talk about domain registrations.
In 2005, Google filed a patent where they revealed some ideas about using historical data to create relevancy scores for documents. In that patent, there was an interesting line about the length of domain registrations, and how it could be used to create a score:
40. The method of claim 38, wherein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.
Ok that doc is pretty techie, but here’s the point. Google believes that they can calculate a score based on when your domain expires. I have no way to prove that Google is actually using this metric, but I believe that it makes sense for them to. Google is very logical and it makes sense that spammers aren’t going to want to do long registrations on their spammish domains. They know that they will have to throw them away anyway.
A spammer that goes through thousands of domains each year isn’t going to want to spend $100 each year to do a 10 year registration on each domain they use. They are going to want to pay $10 and save themselves the money. 1000 domains at $100 each would cost $100,000. 1000 domains at $10 each would only cost $10,000.
Logically speaking (and Google is very logical), it would make sense that a $100 investment is nothing for a serious business.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that this is a metric that Google puts a lot of weight into. That said, if your domain already has some of the signs of being any type of spam, a one-year registration can really add to the evidence.
Google has multiple filters and a person who wants to do the best job they can with their search engine optimization needs to be aware of all of them (or of as many of them as possible). If you have a solid site that’s a legitimate business, it shouldn’t be a huge investment to add a year or two or ten to your domain registration. Adding even a year will help to lower the likelihood that your site is spam. Making it a 10 year registration would probably have even more of an effect.
I don’t want any of you to think that this is a necessity. It isn’t. I have made plenty of money from domains that have one year registrations. I believe that this is a small piece of what Google uses to calculate rankings, I simply want to gain advantage in as many areas as I possibly can.
Tags: domain registration, domain registration length, search engine optimization
I did not know that! I usually only buy domains for one year at a time, so I may have to look into this.
Yah… for newbies, I’d buy a 1-year domain. If you have a site that is already making you some money, using some of that money by investing in a multi-year domain registration that can help your site with SEO a bit more (making you even more money)
Be wise about this…. for a niche like gardening (which people will be doing for years and years to come), a 10-year domain registration might make sense. But, a website about Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana, although it make be making a lot of money now, would be silly to get a 10-year domain registration for.
I have the same thoughts as you and this just make sense to me.
I’ve been doing 2 years renewals or more on my popular sites and hope to do the same for all the domains that I own.
How about Blogger blogs? How does this affect the free platforms? It sure hasn’t hurt Griz’s MMO blog.
If my current domain will gain great SEO, I will continue extending my rregistration.
This is cool and I hadn’t thought of it myself before. I read a little blurb about this on WF the other day and it sounded pretty interesting. I’ll give it a try on one of my domains and we’ll see how it does. Thanks!
wow, I did not realize this thanks. I am going to add some years