DW Tips

So you finally got it. After much painstaking decision-making, and likely vacillating amongst choices, you’ve finally chosen a domain name for your business. Perhaps you feel particularly attached to it, even proud of it as the fruit of your intensive labours.

On the other hand, you may simply be jumping at the first name that came up, but you are certainly keen on high Google ratings. In either case, length of domain name registration is a piece of the Search Engine Optimisation puzzle that you can’t really afford to ignore.

Do you register your domain name for the full 10 years, 5 years, or simply just one?

There are many who will say that length of domain name registration doesn’t affect your page rating one iota. Not only that, but they can also point to a number of sites belonging to successful companies ranking at the top of search results, who renew their domain only once a year. They simply can’t see how something as seemingly inconsequential can play any kind of serious SEO role.

On the other side of the argument, however, is some fairly solid-appearing evidence. It appears that part of a patent that Google asked for in regards to PageRank specifically lists length of domain name registration as one of the factors that they consider. It can then be argued that the future domain expiration date can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of that domain.

Whether or not a search engine’s algorithms use length of domain name registration as a deciding factor in your site’s page ranking really doesn’t matter. If it does, the effect is likely small. What really matters, though, is that they can. In today’s shark-infested digital waters, your business needs every edge that it can gain. With the relatively low cost of domain registration, you can certainly afford to buy into length of registration as valid SEO.

Can you afford not to? Contact us for more information on website design and branding to take your business to the next level!