Earlier today I was browsing around SearchEngineLand and found this helpful little article about the 29 Worst Practices & Most Common Failures: SEO Checklist.
Basically, this article is a simple checklist of 29 worst SEO practices with a brief explanation of why the practices listed are bad. Some of the practices are pretty basic for well versed search engine optimizers (although some of the practices listed may shock even the more expert SEO marketers), but for those who are new to the SEO game, this list is pretty helpful. I’m not exactly sure how many of our customers are SEO experts and how many are SEO newbies, but regardless of your expertise, I would recommend printing out the check list and see where you and your site stand.
Mark Medina
Director of Marketing
Mark,
discountasp.net doesn’t accept multiple year domain registrations, per your billing department. This is an SEO problem because multiple year registrations are often said to improve domain authority rating. Please fix this simple problem so that your loyal customers don’t suffer from lower search engine results simply because discountasp can’t accept our money for extended registration. Hey, even GoDaddy has solved this 😉
Bill,
The length of domain registration and the impact it has on SEO is minimal, EXTREMLY minimal at best. Here’s a link to an article about this topic:
http://searchengineland.com/google-domain-registrations-dont-affect-seo-or-do-they-25483
The article quotes Goolge’s very own Matt Cutts:
“To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling”
Also in this article, there is a video of Matt where he discusses this topic. Here are some quotes from Matt regarding domain registration length and SEO:
“Make great content and don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for. Just because someone is sending you an email that says Google does or even may use this in ranking, does not mean that you should automatically take them at face value. What makes a really big difference is the quality of your site and the sort of links that you have pointing to you, not, you know, is my site registered for three or four years, instead of one or two years.”
If you’re still that concerned about the length of domain registration, then you are free to register your domains a domain registrar that accepts multi-year domain registration while you host your site with us.
I’d also like to add that GoDaddy is first and foremost a domain registrar. Domain registration is their core competency (so yes they want you to register domains with them). DiscountASP.NET is a host that specializes in ASP.NET hosting and this our core competency 🙂
Mark,
Thanks for that link. For our new site I was using SEOMOZ ($99/mo), Woorank and RavenTools (also $99/mo).
The first two tools sent me warning messages about the registration period. That triggered my messages to your finance dept and to you later.
But after reading more articles, and thanks for yours, I now believe that registration period is a red herring. Even the founder of SEOMOZ said that registration period has minimal impact (yet his software creates warnings).
So I’ll retract my complaint. Thanks again for the reply.
Bill Kania