Length of domain registration

I am hoping to find out the length of domain registration really effects serps in google. I have just transferred my domain from yahoo whom I had only a 1 year registration to a different registrar for 3 years.

Right now my posts in this forum rank in google from my sig links while my site will not rank in the top 1000! This could also be a sandbox thing the site is approaching 1 year old.

 

Is there a question somewhere in there

 

in my experience yes, it definitely matters. We just did a test with 20 new domains, half registered for 3 years, half for 1 year, did all the same stuff with getting them indexed (which was a LOT of stuff), and after 2 weeks the 3 year domains were all PR2 and the 1 year domains were PR0. I am making sure all my domains are registered at least 3 years out.

 

brian ... interesting i've read about the registration period having an impact
but that seems to confirm it ... any thoughts on whether it has to be when
the name is purchased or if extending it will accomplish the same goal

I just added some new sites and saw a whois lookup in the logs for each new
site I added, unfortunately all were for 1 year terms

jay

 

I've had the same experience. Registered a domain for one year, it was sandboxed right away, registered another for 2 years, the site never went into the sandbox. Obviously there are other factors involved, but I do think that domain registration length is one of them.

 

That I do not know. But my educated guess is that extending an existing registration is just as good as a new registration.

 

Very prudent and interesting information.

Sounds like I need to stop procrastinating on those renewals...

Thanks for the tip folks - highly appreciated.

 

Could this be because Google (and other SEs) would potentially see a longer lasting domain less likely to be a spam site?

 

Not a question just wanted other peoples thoughts on this. As I said before my site does horrible in google. In fact this post will probably rank for the terms in my sig but my site won't be in the top 1000.

Thats interesting although I didn't think it had anything to do with pr
The domain in question is pr 4 with a subdomain at pr 5

 

With all due respect, it doesn't do anything of the kind. There are simply too many other factors that are as likely or more likely to have made the difference.

Sometimes I think that Google-watching has generated more superstitious thinking in the last decade than in the entire prior history of homo sapiens.

As I've said repeatedly, this is such a naive concept and so easily (and cheaply) spoofed that I don't believe for a moment that Google actually gives any weight to it, patent application (from 2003, by the way) or no patent application. I can believe that Google would consider site age as a factor, i.e., how long the site has been online, but not the future length of the domain registration period. That would be just too dumb and Google just does not have a history of "dumbness".

 

Thanks for the reminder to extend my domains... I'd been meaning to do it for just this purpose.

 

minstrel, i can see that its a leap to say it confirms it

but, i don't think i'd agree with its "dumb" ... they seem to constantly be
trying to eliminate their version of spam sites and checking the reg period
seems like a pretty locigal filter since "most" would be registered for a 1 year
period

just my thoughts

jay

 

The Google Patent does in fact mention the length of domain registration, but it has been taken completely out of contect IMO.

The patent filing states:

Looking at that alone, it would be easy to infer that, "Oh no, I have to register all of my domains for ten years to be considered legitimate and rank well with Google!"

This is not the case.

Looking at this item alone is taking it out of content and demeaning of its intent. This section of the patent is referring to scoring documents (or pages) and not websites as a whole.

 

Try to think like a "spam site" owner for a moment. Domain registrations are as low as $5.95 a year (I've even seen $3.95 specials recently for .info and .name sites). If I am a get-rich-quick spam site or porn site owner, hoping to make a quick few hundred or few thousand dollars and then move on to the next scam, do you think I would look at spending $60 give or take for a 10 year registration as anything but a bargain if I thought it would improve my ranking in Google?

That's my point: Google looks for ways to weed out crap and improve relevance and quality of their index. There just is no way, in my opinion, that they (Google) are dumb enough to believe that using forward domain registration as a factor will accomplish this.

 

it would be too easy to corrupt an serp system that relied on the length of domain registration as a factor... i've been on the web since the mid '90's, and the best site i have gets renewed on a yearly basis... other sites of mine get renewed years in advance, and one of those got slammed by google a couple of months ago.

i see no correlation between search ranking and forward domain registration.

 

More info on domain expiry dates...

Google:

Microsoft:

Amazon:

Apple:

Intel:

DigitalPoint:

 

The best spammers have hundreds (thousands?) of spam domains...so their total cost would be significantly higher.

I put domain registration length (total - past and future) in the same catagory of importance of "search friendly urls". It may have an importance factor/influence on the serps of 1 on the 10,000 scale.

 

So would their total income from all those domains... calculate that $60 per domain as an ROI figure per domain.

 

I understand what you're saying but for the same reason wouldn't it make sense for any legitimate website to do the same. As for me I didn't know when I registered that it "could" be an issue. At this point I don't want to take any chances and as you said with the low cost of domain names any legitimate website should register for more than one year. I'm not saying however that i think there would be any benefit to registering for say 8 years as opposed to 4 years.

 

I know...I was just pointing that out. Average joe spammer probably doesn't have a few thousand $$$ to drop on domains

The main point I was making is I think it's a (or will be at some point) viable, although practically insignificant, factor in the serps.

That's just my opinion...which is typically valued far below 2 cents