Today I extended the domain registration for these domains out until July 31, 2018.
- criticalmas.com
- digitalcolony.com
- ineedcoffee.com
- michaelallensmith.com
- and a new site not yet launched
Why would I take on 10 years of registration costs now? I only saved a few bucks by extending out a decade. Last year I learned that the search engines look up the length of a website’s registration to assess value. Although there is debate online if the search engines look at it, according to the article Does the Length of a Domain Registration Affect Your Rank, Google does mention it in their patent.
According to the patent, “Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.” According to this statement in the patent, domains that expire in 10 years are more valuable and legitimate than domains that will expire in less than a year.
In the event the search engines don’t use this in their algorithms, oh well. I just pre-paid for an expense I was already committed to.
