Does Domain Registration Length Affects SEO Rankings?
What is Domain Registration Length in SEO?
Domain Registration Length means for the number of year’s, the domain renewal amount paid in advance to the Registrar, You can pay for at least 1 year & maximum 10 years. For every domain bought, you have to pay a yearly renewal amount.
Webmaster says Search Engine gives more preference to the domains which are registered for a long time. Because domains which are bought for spamming web are generally registered for not more than a year.
What does Google say?
Officially, Google’s Matt Cutts has declined by saying: To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring(for SEO). If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling.
If you don’t have time to watch the video, Matt says: “My short answer is not to worry about that very much. Not very much at all, in fact.
Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrars that were sending around emails…that said: “Did you know that Google gives you a bonus in ranking if you register your site for 3 or more years?”. Just to clarify, that’s not based on anything that we’ve said.
My short answer is make great content, don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for. Just because someone is sending you an email that says “Google does” or even may use this in ranking, it doesn’t mean that you should automatically take them at face-value.
What makes a really big difference is the quality of your site, and the sort of links that you have pointing to you, not “Is my site registered for 3 or 4 years, instead of 1 or 2 years?”
Should we register domains for a longer period?
Technically speaking, Matt Cutts has given a quite diplomatic answer, he is neither denying nor accepting the fact fully.
To our knowledge, we should not worry much about the domain registration length as it is not a very strong ranking factor. No one can say that yes this is the best factor and we should focus on this. These small ranking factors don’t work in the big picture.
If you have a great site, with the good amount of content & links, then Google will surely rank you higher in their SERPs.
If you are “forbes.com” then it doesn’t matter whether you have registered it for 1 year or 10 years. But if you have a domain name like buy-cheap-shoes-online-in-mumbai.com then it might matter.
Conclusion
We suggest that anyways you should go for registering your domain for more than 1 year because, if it is your brand domain then you are probably going to use it for long.
Read how domain age & whois data acts as an SEO ranking factor.
Also, one more benefit of registering it for long is you get some good amount of discount on registering the domain for more than 1 year.
Lastly, don’t bother much about it, just see if it fits your budget & focuses on other more important SEO factors.
Very helpful content
Thank you, Kousik.