There has long been discussion within the search engine optimization community about the importance of domain age. Two of the elements of your website that the search engine spiders check out as they “crawl” are the site and domain age. While the search engines may not give lots of weight to domain age, it is relevant because the older the domain, the more established and credible the search engine indexing algorithm may assume the associated business is.
Since we don’t have time machines, we can’t do anything about the age of our domain, but we can make sure that our domain is registered as far forward as our domain registrar will allow. The search engine algorithm must figure that a domain registered for 5 years or more represents an entity in it for the long haul which lends a certain credibility as opposed, say, to a spamming website which could be here today and (hopefully) gone tomorrow.
So, rather than set your domain to automatically renew on an annual basis, pay for the domain as far in advance as your domain registrar permits. It’s not very expensive, and actually prepaying for 5 years will probably get you a lower annual fee. You’ll not only save some money in the long run, but the search engine optimization you’re working so hard on will get just a little easier!
