I have heard that if you domain has less than 6 months left on it's registration it can go against your rankings. Is this true?? If so would I be better buying additional years now instead of waiting to closer the renewal date?
Google and other search engines may penalize websites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time. Most registrars support paying upfront for several years and the cost is usually only about $10-$20 per year, so it is generally worth it. This topic has been discussed on other threads. See below.
I read a bunch of threads about this here on digitalpoint. 50% are saying yes it affects rankings, the other 50% are saying no it doesn't affect rankings. No one seems to know the accurate answer to this question so i'm puzzled as well on this one.
It may be a minor criteria in the Google algorithm, but I haven't noticed a difference between my sites SERPs. I have some with 10 year, 5 year, and 1 year renewals. They all seem to rank based on the on page SEO and incoming links...everything else isn't noticeable.
It seems everyone is on the fence with this one, no one knows for sure but if you plan to be around for awhile why not take the extra years , its normally cheaper the more years you register.