Multi-Year Domain Registration and SEO

Often times we receive questions from customers asking if registering a domain name for more than one year has any positive impact on a web site’s search engine rankings.  Unfortunately it is often claimed that multi-year domain registrations improve domain authority, thus having a positive impact on a site’s search engine optimization.  I would like to clarify that the number of years a domain is registered for has extremely minimal, if any, impact on SEO.

In an article titled “Google Says Domain Registrations Don’t Affect SEO, Or Do They?” Google’s very own Matt Cutts is quoted:

“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”

Here is a short video where Matt gets into a little more detail regarding this topic:

I think the key takeaway from the video is when Matt says:

“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.”

I don’t think Matt could have made the point any clearer: MAKE GREAT CONTENT – and build quality links.