Length of Domain Registration and Ranking

All of us know that the age of the domain has a certain role to play in the ranking of the website. What many of us would not have even guessed is that the duration of your domain registration could influence your ranking. When we hear this for the first time we will wonder how this is connected to ranking and why should this be used as one of the criteria in the first place. However, the discussion on this topic remains highly speculative. Though it is highly speculative, the rationale behind is highly compelling.

If you were really serious about your business then you would make sure that your domain name remains with you. If you happen to lose your domain name then it could cost you heavily to re-own your domain name depending on the popularity of the domain name. To avoid any mess-ups in this area, most companies try to register their domains for longer period of time. However, there are some who want to benefit from the possible fall of price in domain registration in future, may register their domain name for shorter periods of time. Through our own experience, we know that it is a high possibility that the cost of domain name registration can drop further.

However, those who argue that the duration or the length of the domain registration affects your website’s ranking say that popular search engines like Google always look for ways and means of weeding the good from the bad. Under this pretext, it could be a high possibility that Google can consider domains that are registered for shorter periods of time are not valuable. Stable businesses go for longer periods of domain registration. Websites that are created to boost the ranking of other websites are often registered for shorter periods of time and they are used as throwaway sites. Such websites affect the quality of user experience. Therefore, by filtering such websites, search engines try to enhance user experience. Amongst all the other factors, Google may also probably consider the length of your domain registration period. According to this view, the longer you register a domain, the better ranking you will get.

We can never be sure how search engine algorithms work. Even if the argument seems valid, there is a serious downside to this view or approach. There are number of small entrepreneurs and home based businesses that try to keep their annual costs low to see better profit. Such business owners may prefer to live one day at a time and would be registering their website for a shorter period of time and renew it every year. They are no spammers, they have genuine business interest and by using the length of the domain registration as one of the ranking criteria, search engines penalize the websites unnecessarily. It will be an interesting experiment to test this condition with two new websites that are equal on all levels except the length of the domain registration and see how their ranking is affected.

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