Longer Domain Registrations May Help Google Rankings

One of the variables that Google uses to determine the search engine rankings for a site is how trustworthy the domain is. Google's trustrank is not recognized by Google as an official algorithm but its effects can often be seen during the domain development process.

Google primarily uses trustrank to improve the quality and relevance of its search results. By increasing the trustrank of their sites, domain developers can expect to see higher visibility in Google's search results which would generate increased, targeted traffic and higher revenues for their online properties.

Some of the widely known factors that determine a domain's trustrank are:

• The domain's age
• The number of incoming links
• The PageRank of the incoming links
• The topic of the website located at the domain
• Frequency of content updates
• Existence of a privacy policy
• Readily available contact information
• A site-map

Another lesser known factor that a number of SEO experts believe will help a domain's trustrank is the length of the domain registration period. In other words, if all else is equal, a domain that has 5 years left on its registration period will have a higher Google trustrank than a domain that expires in 6 months.

The logic adds up since spammers would rarely register domains for more than 1 year since their techniques usually result in the domain being blacklisted in a short amount of time. For them, adding additional years to a domain's registration period would be a waste of money. It makes perfect sense for Google to include the domain registration period into factoring trustrank.

For domain name developers, a small investment in extending their domain's registration length may end up paying for itself through increased revenues as a result of better search engine rankings. This ties in well with the growing trend of domainers opting to develop their domains into niche mini-sites instead of parking their domains and relying entirely on type-in traffic. I don't believe this would have much of an effect on parked domains due to the lack of index-able content. I've tested this recently on a few of my mini-sites but it's too early to draw any conclusions. I'd really like to hear from others who have tried this and are willing to report the results.

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