When launching a new online venture the choice of domain name is obviously vital. However, I wonder if the general public (or even experienced SEOers) register the domain for a length of time that is decided on anything other than financial reasons. The registration cost per year is lower for longer registration periods, but does the importance of the registration period end there?

As part of my work, I am often asked to predict how well a new domain will rank in certain markets. I pay close attention to the obvious ranking factors (onpage work, links, etc.) but I have found the those domains that are registered on a long-term basis tend to appear quicker in the rankings. This has been all but confirmed by Google.

A Google patent did state that domains registered for long periods (10 years stated in the patent) are deemed more legitimate, and the content within more trustworthy. From this, we can assume that a longer registration term does indeed have a positive impact on ranking.

Having had a few days to ingest Google Instant, and about 3000 blogs posts on its potential impact, there is one undeniable fact – noone seems to have a firm grasp on what impact this will have. However, there is an overwhelming feeling that the doom mongers claiming the death of SEO are wrong and have been shouted down by the rest of the community.

To add my tuppen’orth, and ignoring the impact on paid search, my thoughts on Instant are as follows:

• Top Positions are even more important – the comparison between CTR for sites above and below the fold has always been stark. Google Instant will make higher positions even more important as not only is there a smaller space for which top positions to appear, but multiple searches bring multiple top ranking sites to catch the eye.
• No MAJOR change in longtail search – a real hot potato this one! My personal thoughts are that longtail will still be used extensively and will remain a key factor allowing smaller sites to compete with the big guys. When Google Suggest was launched in 2009, many people were predicting the death of longtail, but in reality little changed. Yes, Instant is more of a ‘paradigm shift’ (god, I hate management speak) and will have more of an impact, but I think that this will still be fairly small.
• Interstitial Results – When I started sampling Instant, something jumped out at me – the constant changing and flashing of results was extremely annoying when I knew exactly what I was searching for. Just like interstitial advertising (ads appearing before vids), it can be seen as a major annoyance for those seeking something specific. This could well lead to many simply disabling Instant, making any arguments over potential changes to traffic and rankings moot.

We can only wait and see what the precise impact will be, but I strongly believe that it is very unlikely to provide a wholesale change to the way people search.

As all SEOers know, URL strength can be a great assistance in getting a site ranking well. If a URL contains the same text as the search term, then it is usually going to rank better than a site without that strength (if comparing between sites with similar age, link profile, etc.). But, this is one of those (many!) parameters when looking at ranking that is extremely hard to quantify.

As part of my role is to predict the amount of work it will take to rank a site, and how long this may take, I was wondering if it was useful to try to quantify the importance of URL strength. As such, I looked at 50 random keywords of differing length and compared the link profile of the top ten sites for each keyword – for sites with URL strength against those without. This was obviously a pretty laborious task, but a decent amount of data was required to ensure that all the other myriad parameters would equal themselves out. In other words, across the 500 sites assessed other factors such as domain age should be the same (on average).

The following table shows a sample of the data that was gathered.

The results of this showed that those sites with URL strength only required around 40% of the number of links to rank top ten, compared to those sites without the strength. Of course, this does not take into account the absolutely vital matter of link strength and relevancy but the size of the data sample should offset this somewhat.

The conclusion of this? It confirms what everyone knew anyway, but a firm figure can be used as a benchmark to give an idea of what might be required when trying to rank competitive websites when URL strength is a strong factor.