Revisiting the Ten Year Registration Debate

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Revisiting the Ten Year Registration Debate

Asia_Expat

11:33 am on Apr 30, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have become convinced that a lengthy registration is significant. I've been looking at a broad range of websites in my niche and ALL of the successful ones has long registrations, at least 5 years in advance. Conversely, ALL of the losers in my niche have one year registrations.

I recently moved to a new registrar. My old one only provided one year registrations but my new one offer long registrations and I decided to go for a five year extension. The main reason is I fear accidentally losing the domain but I also hope that an algo will take notice.

What is the current thinking on this? From my observations of competitors and related sites in my area, a long registration is very significant.

caveman

1:44 pm on Apr 30, 2008 (gmt 0)

Look at it the other way around: The engines look for "signals of quality". One they noticed a long time ago was that legit sites tended to have registered their domains for 5+ years. Businesses wanted to set and forget their domain admin more or less, and avoid risk of loss of the domain inadvertantly.

OTOH, spammers tended to churn and burn lots of domains, and did not want to waste money on domains renewal charges for domains they did not care about.

Now the phenomenon may have become somewhat self-reinforcing, since those who pay attention to the SEO/SEM side of things, having realized this, tend to renew their domains for longer periods. Which over time, may have the ironic effect of lessening this measure's importance in the algo. Ebbs and flows.