Many people believe that registering a domain name for longer periods of time can help your search engine optimization. If registration time periods do play a factor in some major search engines algorithm it wouldn't be much. The common belief is that if you register a domain name for a longer period you prove to be more trusting and showing you might be around for awhile. This actually is a silly idea, regardless of your registration period you still must be crawled and indexed for a long period of time before search engines trust your site or give it any authority.

If you have a basic idea of search engine optimizing this would make sense. You need "time" to get your website trusted by search engines. In reality, 99% of the time your site is going to take "time" before it ranks very well in search engines. Remember, some SEO webmasters are very good at ranking high for competitive search terms in short periods of time. Easily 50% of those webmasters registered less than one year for their websites domain.

One of the key methods of ranking well and getting trusted by search engines is backlinks. This usually always comes with time, your not going to get 500+ one-way authority backlinks in one year. Yes, it can be done, but it's not that simple and doesn't work all the time. It always depends on the niche and competition sites when it comes to ranking in search engines. You can easily say most sites take over a year to "mature" into a well trusted site.

Now, this doesn't mean don't register your domain for only a year, merely you shouldn't base your registration period on the SEO factor, I believe it plays little to no factor in search engine optimizing. However, it is a good idea to register for longer periods because of the price. The longer you register the cheaper it is, and saving money is always a good thing. So remember, don't base your registration length on SEO, base it on cost.