We have a question from JZ, in Ohio who asks: How much weight
does the number of years a domain is registered for have on
your ranking?
My short answer is not to worry about that very much, not
very much at all in fact.
Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there
were some registrars that were sending around emails saying:
“Did you know that Google gives you a bonus in ranking if
you register your site for three or more years?” And just to
clarify that is not based on anything that we’ve said. The only
thing that that might be coming from is that we did file
a patent that basically said we can use historical data in
our ranking, so you could, in theory, look how many years of
that site has been registered for, just like you could look
at the history of a site to say whether you think it’s high quality or low
quality. But we have a lot of ideas and we file a lot of
patents and that does not mean that all of that gets used in the
ranking. So, I don’t want people to jump to the assumption that
just because there was one patent filed in 2002 and 38
claims down somebody said: “well, you can at look how many
years a site is registered for and to jump to the conclusion
that we use that in our ranking.
So my short answer is, 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.
Uhm. 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.

“How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking?”

Recorded on April 23, 2009.