Does Maxing Out Your Domain Registration Matter?

It’s a common concept in the SEO world that domain age and website history do play a role in determining search engine placements… especially in Google. But what about giving credit for domain age in the opposite direction… as in the number of years you register a domain name. One could see this as the “invested age” of a domain name. According to Matt Cutts’ video, we should not worry about the registration age… not really at all, he says. But he doesn’t just come out and say it doesn’t count at all or that at some point it could be triggered.

So do we listen to Matt Cutts, do we just ignore the registration period? Mannix Marketing’s official standpoint is….  NO!

Matt explains in the video that the number of years out a domain is registered for has little-to-no significant affect on SEO. To him, the minimum registration period of one year is a long time. For normal sites with good quality content, domain registration should not be a factor… not really at all. Well not really at all doesn’t sound like nothing, does it? And it also leaves open the possibilities for future algorithmic updates.

Mannix doesn’t feel that the domain registration age plays a huge role… and an example of this would be when your domain comes close to the expiration date, we don’t just see the placements drop off. No, we feel that it’s very minor, but these minor details are what adds up to eventual success in the search engines. If there are 2000 checks that come under scrutiny for a website’s authority on a keyword phrase in a given search engine, don’t you want to make sure you’re passing as many of these as possible… even if they are minor?

Even if Matt Cutts is right, even if there is absolutely no current algorithmic check on the domain registration age… here are some reasons why you should still MAX your registration out:

• Protect your investment - By extending your domain name registration, you’re lowering the chances where expiration could come up and unknowingly lose control of your investment.
• Less to worry about - By keeping your registration periods longer, you don’t need to have to keep making sure you’re domain is safe every year or two.
• Saves money – The longer you register your domain, the cheaper it costs. These costs add up when you own multiple TLDs.

Matt Cutts is not going to come right out and disclose what all of the algorithmic checks are, he’s very “lawyerly” and well aware of what he’s passing along to the public. It’s up to a good SEO company to make inferences and decide what is and isn’t a good idea. And to Mannix Marketing, it makes a lot of sense to MAX out your domain registration period from an SEO standpoint, from a Webmaster’s standpoint and from a business investment standpoint… regardless of whether or not registration age applies to Google’s algorithm.

Tags: domain age, domain names, domain registration

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 7:53 am and is filed under Google & Search, SEO & Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.