My short answer is not to worry about that too much, not very much at all, in fact.
Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrants sending out emails that said something like ‘Oh, did you know that Google gives you a bonus in ranking if you register you domain for 3 or more years’. Just to clarify, this is not based on anything that we’ve said.
The only thing that might be coming from is that we did file a patent that basically said that we could use historical data in your ranking – so you could, in theory, be looking at how many years the site has been registered for. Just as like you could look at the history of the site to see whether the site was high quality or low quality.
We have a lot of ideas and we filed a lot of patents and that doesn’t mean that all that gets used in our ranking. I don’t want people to jump to assumptions that just because there was one patent filed in 2002 and 38 claims down somebody says ‘Well, you can see how many years site has registered for’, and to jump to a conclusion that that’s what we use in our ranking.
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 sends you an email saying that Google does or even may use this is ranking. It doesn’t mean that you should always take them at face value.
What makes a big difference is quality of your site and links that you have pointing to you, not ‘Is my site registered to 3-4 years instead of 1-2 years’.
Related posts:
- When permanently redirecting (301) a large number of domains (read: more than 10) to one domain, does Google flag this as suspicious? What considerations does Google look at? For the purposes of this question, let’s assume this is a consolidation move
- When you move a domain from one registrar to another, or your registrar information changes very slightly (e.g. new phone number), will Google ding you for instability at the registrar?
- Will SEO still exist in 5 years?
- What impact do site load times have on Google’s ranking?
- Are you ever going to do “weather reports” like Yahoo! does for algorithm updates? Simply a confirmation that one has happened would please many SEOs, as clients might think they’ve been penalized. Your algo update reports years ago were wonderful.
