How many years should you register your domain name?

There are many questions to be answered having to do with domain names. We will go over a few of the common questions pertaining to domain name registration in order to give you a better idea of the subject.

How do search engines treat the length of time a domain name has been registered? How many years should you renew a domain name for? 1 year, 2 years, 10 years? Your own competition will be a good gauge of this, if you look to see how long your competitors have had their domain names registered you can simply follow along. I would only be looking at the best competitors since they will be ranked close to or ahead of you. In fact, if your competition renews their domain names every year or two, I would think strongly about out doing them by registering your domain name for 5+ years. To be honest, the length of time your domain name renewal period is, will not be that big of a factor in search engine rankings. But every little bit might help, especially in a really competitive niche.

A 5 or 10 year registration might also make the most business sense. Why deal with the renewal process every year if you don’t need to? There is a really good chance that if you were to accidentally allow your domain name to expire, someone will swoop in to register that name. I had this happen to me a few years ago. The company that bought it set up a site with nothing but ads, in the hopes that any old traffic would come in directly and click on an ad. Basically, they were trying to get my old traffic that I had built up over time. This obviously works for them, since there are many sites set up just for that reason. They can most likely make up for the cost of the domain name just from the adsense clicks.
These types of companies will also make the domain name available for sale in the hopes that you screwed up and accidentally let it expire. They will jack up the price of the domain and hope you will buy it back from them for 100’s of times what it’s worth.

Some companies register their domain names for 100 years. I would not personally recommend doing that simply because, how do we know how the way the internet will function even 20 years from now, let alone 100 years. This option costs around $1000. I think that would be throwing money away. Domain names might not even be necessary in the future.

The point of all this is to make sure to not let your domain name expire. You would have to start all of the SEO over again, and we all know how fun that is. Imagine if you had to start back linking, ranking, and getting all your customers back just because you let the domain name expire. It’s just not worth the risk, so go and renew your domain name today.