I was reading a forum post by Willie Crawford who is one of my
favorite Internet marketers. Willie brought up a point that
Google may favor ranking domains that have longer registration
periods. His source, a domain name registrar, stated the
following:
 
"As part of Google's recent patent application, Google made
apparent its efforts to wipe out search engine spam, stating:
 
'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.'
 
Domains registered for longer periods give the indication, true
or not, that their owner is legitimate. Google uses a domain's
length of registration when indexing and ranking a Web site for
inclusion in their organic search results.
 
To prove to everyone that your site is the real deal, register
for more than one year and increase your chances of boosting
your search ranking on Google."
 
Some domain name registrars are inclined to promote this
position because it may motivate their customers to increase the
terms of their domain registration, thereby increasing the
profits of the registrar.
 
That being said, I can also understand Google and other search
engines considering the term of a domain registration as a small
part of their algorithm used to determine free rankings of a
website in their search engine. It is the job of every search
engine to provide the most relevant search results possible and
it is often the website owners who have a long-term mindset that
are providing the most value to their visitors.
 
Aside from the search engines, I do know that some website
visitors also check how long a domain is registered as part of
their own personal due diligence to decide if they want to do
business with a company or not. Think about it... If you are
providing a service and your potential customer goes to
http://www.whois.net and finds out that your domain expires in
less than a year, they might think you're a "fly-by-night"
company that won't be there when they need you and decide not to
do business with you.
 
All in all, I believe it's important to have a long-term mindset
when building your Internet business. If it helps you even
slightly to get a better search engine ranking or increase the
trust that potential customers have in your website, registering
a domain name for a few extra years is a sound investment.
 
Inspired by this insight myself, I just added 5 additional years
of registration do my Dotcomology.com domain which is now
currently set to expire in the year 2012. I plan to be around
until then and hopefully much longer. What about you? 

Stone Evans is the author of "Dotcomology - The Science of
Making Money Online" and he wants you to know that you shouldn't
pay a dime for any ebook, marketing course, software program or
anything else until you've read the groundbreaking document you
can download free at: http://www.Dotcomology.com