SEO: Do Multi-year Domain Registrations Increase Search Engine Rankings?

[mandy]

Domain registration costs vary from around $7 a year to around $15 a year, depending on the registrar. Most registrars give you a bit of a discount if you register your domain for several years at once, so let's average things out to $10 a year for a registration. That means a site owner might spend around $10 to register their domain for one year, or around $50 to register it for five.

Does anyone honestly believe $40 is a high enough price that someone aiming to build throw-away domains to gain quick rankings and make money will opt for the single year registration instead? Do you think Google believes it? After all, anyone who can't make an extra $40 off a domain name in a year has no business building throw-away domains or trying to game the system anyway.

It's ludicrous to think $40 is a high enough price to sort the serious businesses from the search engine gamers. I know it, you know it and the search engines know it...

full article: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennife...longer.php

[jezebel]

It's ludicrous to think $40 is a high enough price to sort the serious businesses from the search engine gamers. I know it, you know it and the search engines know it...

[accentnepal]

It probably works out in the stats that more spammers and other creepy crawleys use one year domains - and cheap infos too, most likely. Yes, if they were to max out their gains they should buy more years, but their momma won't raise their allowance.

I bought a few extra years for my sales site before the recent Verisign price hike - didn't notice any difference.