SEO Effect of Registering Domains for Longer Period

Yesterday I was working on a draft about SEO tips for yahoo (hopefully I can finish it in few hours) and one thing which was popping every time was that people strongly believes about yahoo that domains which are registered for more than a year i.e. domains which are not going to expire in a year are more likely to rank well, provided all other metrics being same.

I have heard this many times as well as about google patent that sites which are registered for 10+ years gets seo advantage (SEO field is filled with all kind of speculations, so I have stopped getting surprised now and you too should stop doing it)

Its very hard for any one to confirm that registering domains for 10+ years is going to help you in SEO but since search engines take hundreds of micro and macro factors into consideration, this can be very well one of those minor things which do play little part. Personally I do think it does make some difference though very little.

This obviously should not mean that everyone who has registered domains for 10+ years will start appearing on top of search engines and it certainly don’t sound a very good financial move to register all your domains for 10+ years, still if you have a very good site, you may like to register it for a longer period. This will also keep you relaxed from domain expiry troubles too if you are absent minded guy like me.

By the way on the side note, Google.com expires in 2011(who is backordering it?), yahoo.com in 2012, mahalo.com in 2016, squidoo.com in 2011, hubpages.com in 2010 so there is clearly no trend shown here (specially for last 3 sites, for which SEO matters heavily as all traffic is driven by search engines only).

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