I don’t know if this is actually useful or not, but I tried it a few weeks ago and my traffic is up. Correlation != causation and all that aside, it only cost me about $8 so maybe you want to try it too.
WebsiteGrader, a project of Dharmesh Shah and the rest of the team at Hubspot, suggests that if you have a website domain registration which will expire in a year or less, then you may be penalized by search engines, which think you might be a fly-by-night spam site operator.
Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a committment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website has not been setup as a temporary spam site.
Up until a few weeks ago, I had about half a year left on my registration. When I read their inducement I went over to GoDaddy and got myself another 2 years, plus prepaid my hosting for a year for a wee discount. My rankings on Google et al are indeed up. Again, I have no way of knowing whether that was caused by this tweak, and I have never heard this SEO tip on other sources of SEO information which I trust, so take it with a grain of salt. That being said, if it isn’t true the most you are out is about $8 which you were going to pay eventually anyway, right?
