Hi everyone, about 6 months ago when all the articles, news and blog stories where floating around about google becoming a domain name registar and possibly using domain aging or expiration data as a factor in their ranking algortihm I decided to take the plunge a spend some dollars and bump up the number of years my domain was registered for in the hope it would help. So far nothing yet, but i wonder if anyone done anything similar and seem a boost of some sort.
Nah it isn't going to help rankings. The rumor was that it was part of the filter to determine whether your site got the new site penalties (sandbox). It is more than a rumor as it is mentioned in one of Google's patents. That doesn't mean they are using it or that they give it much weight. I wouldn't hold my breath for any sort of rank increase from it.
It would make sense to flag domains registered for one year as potential spam sites. Google could then add this flag to the list of 300 other factors it looks at and if a site has lots of the flags it is marked as spam. So if you have a normal site it makes no difference.
I can understand google basing their rankings on how old a domain actually is (i.e. from the initial domain registration date), and whether it gets modified frequently or not but not expiry date - you can cancel owning a domain at any time, and some companies may even offer refunds for that. The sites that I have are ranked quite highly for what they are aimed at and I only ever register my domains for a year at a time, so I'm not sure there is any benefit to this.
As you know sometimes in 2005 Google became a whois registrar! I personally believe that the 'registrar' the 'age of the domain' and the 'host' are all factors that are used in the Google algorithm. Quote From the New York Times Feb 10 2005 Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokeswoman, hardly quelled the speculation by explaining that the whole thing was really a learning opportunity for the company. Google "has become a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet's domain name system," she said recently in an e-mail message. "While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results." This is mentioned in the google patent also. However, the weight Google gives to the above is very small in most instances. A domain name of mine registered at Whois.com as an experiment did very well very quickly.
Interesting points and thank you for them all so far. I agree with a lot of things yannis said, but where the 'registrar' is important I do not. Giving say whois.com registered domains a boost more than netsol or easyspace doesn't really make sense. the Eileen rodriguez quote above certainly seems to indicate that domain name data is likely to be integrated into the algo somehow. if not now in the future. Also thehoff mentions the sandbox in his post, a great way of stopping non spam sites is to let new domains with greater than say 2 years registration through the sandbox, and others with less go into the sandbox. This could be a way of letting quality sites with 2+ registrations take rankings immediately as they are highly unlikely to be spam, i'm sure google knows this and has looked at different ways of using the data. That's why I'm certiain domain name info is currently in play or in behind the scenes algorthim dev.