Registering a domain for multiple years

[Motava]

Does registering or renewing a domain name for more than a year improve search as a result of a more trusted site and company that will seem to be around for longer than just a year?

[EGOL]

@billslawski Hi Bill, It's great to see you. I hope you are doing well.

Most of my domains are on the registrar's automatic renewal. Although I have a couple domains set to automatic renewal but I have prepaid them out beyond my reasonable lifetime - cause I don't want to rely on the registrar and I don't want to take a chance that I might forget. If I get SEO benefit for that, great!

[billslawski]

@egol Most domain hosts charge one year at a time and set credit cards on auto-renewal so that people don't need to remember to renew their domains. When I asked my host about renewing for 3 years after reading this patent, they told me that I was the first person to ever ask them that and that most site owners were fine with one year at a time, and auto-renewal being set on their credit cards.

It is very unlikely that only spammers set domain registration for one year - it seems that both site owners and hosts set them up for one year at a time, with auto-renewal possibly set.

[EGOL]

lol...  Alan, you really surprised me with this answer!

Maybe CRS should be added to all of the SEO glossaries?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Quite often.  At least once a year I get a call or email from someone saying "where'd my site go?" and it turns out the domain expired, they didn't see or get the email notificaitons, and some scraper stole the domain.  80% or more of those turn out to be CRS

[EGOL]

Alan,  Have you seen any proven cases of CRS?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Seriously - what EGOL said.  I've never once seen a case proven where length of registration helped or harmed a site.  It's a false flag factor.

[EGOL]

Bill Slawski reported a few years ago in a post on his SEO by the Sea blog http://www.seobythesea.com/...

.... that google included length of domain registration in a search patent application.   This does not mean that they actually use length of registration in the algo, just that they said that it might be a factor.

A few months after reading that I added a ten-year extension onto the registration for all of my important domains.  I didn't see any increase in my rankings.

I doubt that this is an important factor... and my decision to extend registration was based 1/2 of the google patent and 1/2 of the fact that I have a mental disorder known as CRS (can't remember shit) and I want to be sure that my domains don't expire.