Does Domain Registration length affect SEO ?

If you are in a hurry to get your answer let me cut the crap right here. 

Yes, domain registration and SEO have a very strong relationship. If your domain is registered for a longer duration (read 5 years or 10 years), it gives you better results in terms of Google Page Rank and SERPs.

If your domain registration is done for a year or couple of years, go ahead and extend the duration.

How does Domain Registration help SEO ?

What is Google looking for end of the day?

-          Relevant Content

-          Trustworthy site

To help this, Google has arrived at an algorithm that reads 150 or more behaviors of the site and arrives at a decision of how quality, trust worthy and relevant the site could be categorized.

Domain Registration is NOT the only factor that impacts the SEO. It is one tiny drop in the scheme of things. The good part is, it is the easiest way to improve SEO.

Consider this:

1. If you ever registered your kid for some extra-curricular class, have you seen some great price reduction for annual fees vs quarterly fees vs monthly fees? 

2. If you are in a corporate environment, you would sometimes see that employees are given business critical projects while temporary consultants, who are probably better, are not.

WHY?

The answer is simple. It’s a matter of trust and commitment. Same goes with Google. Google bots are defined by people like you are me. When they see that the domain is registered for a length of time, they read commitment there. They do not consider you a spammy site and you get the brownie points by ranking higher, relative to other sites, considering all other parameters are EXACTLY similar.

In a nutshell, when Google looks at the domain registration, it adds an element of trust and hence gives you higher score. There are a lot of other ways to improve your rankings in Google, both on-page and off-page.

I have seen my rankings change for my online fashion jewelry store, once I extended the domain registration by 5 years.

Share your views on what you think on Google’s take on domain registration duration.