.orgBetter Rankings in Google for $9.99
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Sounds like a scam, doesn’t it? Well this time it’s not. $9.99 is what GoDaddy charges for a year of domain name registration, and extending your registration by an extra year can have significant impact on your rankings.
Back at the beginning of 2005, Google fulfilled the requirements to become a domain registrar. They had no plans to sell domain names, though. Instead, they were very up front about that fact that what they wanted was access to the underlying registration data behind each domain name.
Why did they want that? Well at first it seemed clear to me that this was a great way to more easily find people running networks of sites in order to game Google’s link algorithm so that they could better fight link spam.
They may indeed be using it for that — I haven’t seen any firm evidence one way or another — but over the next few months, evidence started to emerge that Google was looking at the expiration date on domains and factoring that into their ranking algorithms.
Their logic is that a site that expires soon probably should be ranked below a site that expires several years from now — all other things being equal. After all, if you aren’t willing to register your domain name for the long-term, there’s a good chance you aren’t in this for the long haul and probably don’t have as good a site as someone who is.
Now, there are obviously many, many exceptions to that rule, so this isn’t a make-or-break rule by any means. If you already have pretty good rankings, though, there’s a great chance that you will see noticeable improvements just by making sure that your domain name expires more than two years from now — that seems to be the magic number. I’ve seen it personally make a huge difference, and have heard reports from many others who experienced the same thing.
It may not work for you, but it could also be an easy, cheap path to much better rankings.
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