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SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

Reader Rescue : Does a longer domain registration period affect ranking?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I was just wondering, does a longer URL registration period have a positive effect on a site’s search engine ranking?

Thanks,

Louisa
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Hi Louisa

Google has confirmed in the past that both domain age and ownership history may impact the way a site is handled by the algorithm, albeit slightly. But what you’re asking is whether registering a domain for a longer period of time makes a difference to the site’s ranking?

I haven’t researched this for other search engines, but I recall that a couple of people have asked this question in the Google Webmaster forum in the past.

Google staff member John Mu responded that the length of a domain’s registration period does NOT impact how Google ranks the site. As he states, many registrars don’t publish expiration details and so if Google can’t adequately determine when a site expires, they can’t compare it to other sites so they don’t include that as a ranking factor. Besides which, a registration period for a domain doesn’t reveal much about a site.

The content on the domain is much more important from a search engine perspective than how many years it has been registered for.

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Understanding The Mysteries Of Website Aging

By Richard Adams in Featured

In general, Google gives precedence to older site’s in it’s results. That is, if two identical sites existed, the older of the two would likely rank higher in the search engine results than other.

This makes logical sense of course.

If a website has been up and running for some years it is likely that the webmaster cares enough about it to keep renewing it each year.

Equally his visitors like the site enough to keep returning – thus making it worthwhile for the owner to continue working on it.

Conversely spammers throwing up hundreds of por quality sites realise that their type of sites tend to be banned from the search engines quickly so these sites never last long. After all, why pay to renew a site if you can’t get any visitors to it?

And so this leads us to the mysteries of website aging.

In short, when you launch a new website you will typically have to wait anything between 3 and 6 months for it to really start performing well in Google.

Because of this, older domain names and sites have value purely in terms of their age. Indeed, some internet marketers refer to “aging” a website like a bottle of wine, for best results.

For new web masters this is often not a possibility but as your website empire expands you may want to consider this process for faster results.

The technique is incredibly simple, and essentially involves planning ahead.

You decide on the web site(s) you will likely be building in the next 3-6 month window and buy the domain names now. You stick up a one page “holding site” – the sort that simply says “This site is coming soon” – and then get it indexed in Google.

When it comes to the time to actually build the site you have a well-aged domain.

Another tactic in the websitw aging arena is to register domains for longer periods of time for the very reasons discussed earlier.

Some entrepreneurs have claimed that registering a domain for 2,3 or more even years rather than the standard 1 year will help to convince Google that you’re in for the long haul and that you aren’t planning any “funny business”.

One final technique to discuss on this topic is that of buying existing sites or domains that have been registered in the past.

Here’s an example.

Someone buys a domain, builds a website and markets it. They start generating links to the site buy eventually for whatever reason they stop paying attention to the site.

You may well be able to convince this person to sell you their site – a pre-aged site – for next to nothing which you can then turn into your own site for an instant search engine advantage.

Alternatively you can wait until the domain name expires and hope the owner doesn’t bother renewing it.

You could then snap up this domain for the price of any other – but this time it is pre-aged. It’s already in Google’s index and has links pointing to it.

So you bought yourself a considerable asset at a knockdown price.

Richard Adams has been teaching about ecommerce and online business since 2000 and has a free report for you on how to accept credit cards.