As a standard, I've always registered domains 1-year in advance. Why pay more now? Why not just renew them when it's time?
Anyway, I heard a long time ago from somebody (it wasn't a forum, but can't remember from who) that Google considers the years in advance a domain is registered when calculating ranking.
Now, this sounds like a tin-foil hat theory, but it makes a lot of sense. This wouldn't be a major ranking factor, of course, but it sounds beneficial to include this in a ranking algorithm. Spammers would have to shell out tons of additional money to pay for registration years in advance -- and with the nature of most spam sites, if they do in fact achieve good rankings in the search engines, they usually don't last for too long.
So, I know Google looks at WHOIS -- is the domain registration apart of it?
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