A few years back, GoDaddy started pushing multi-year domain registrations, claiming it would improve the domain's visibility on search engines. The basis for this was an article published that domains used by spammers or fraudsters tend to be registered for only one year, since in that timeframe they are likely to be shut down or blocked. This coincided with some information that Google was proactively taking steps to filter out spam/fraud web sites from their index. The inference was therefore made that one way to circumvent having your domain incorrectly filtered as a spam/fraud site would be if you were to register it for more than one year. Even a 2-year registration would suffice.

Nothing has ever been published or openly acknowledged by search engines that having a domain registered for 2 or more years will increase your visibility in their indexes. And, there are hundreds of factors that go into determining whether a site is legitimate or not. If you run a valid web site or service, your chances of being filtered out for those reasons are almost nil.

Instead, GoDaddy has latched onto this concept, and it's been a huge success. We have migrated a number of customers over to our hosting services over the past few years from GoDaddy who had registered their domains for 10 years, simply because GoDaddy said it would help improve their search engine visibility. Obviously, there are holes in their marketing message, and customers are in our judgement being misled by GoDaddy into lengthier and lengthier registrations for the wrong reason.

Now, it is a sound practice if you want to register your domain for multiple years. For web-savvy companies that perform a WHOIS lookup of your domain, they will note that your domain is not set to expire for many years. This can sometimes serve as an indication that you are planning to keep the company running for many years, and are not a fly-by-night operation. That goes back to the original basis for GoDaddy's marketing message of multi-year registrations. But in the bigger picture, only a small fraction of your site's visitors will likely understand what a WHOIS lookup even means, let alone perform that lookup on your domain.

Ultimately, it really comes down to your personal business decision as to whether you want to register your domain for more than one year at a time. In reality, you will see few if any benefits of even a 2-year registration, let alone 5 or more years. On the flip side, GoDaddy certainly sees the benefit, and that is why they are continuing to promote this message despite the many online postings challenging the accuracy of their pitch.

Best regards,

David Anderson
Principal, Canvas Dreams, LLC