Kevin, It’s “believed” that Google gives more weightage to domains (TLD’s) that are registered for a longer time. Reason – Trust.Chuck’s explanation is good enough to clear the point. Meanwhile, I don’t think Google punishes anyone for not having registerd for a longer time period. Just that if some one else have, they are favoured by G. So if you want the advantage, you better pull up your socks and extend the registration period.

As far as dashes are concerned, I agree with you Louis. They are great for search traffic, but one may not recall it as it should be.

Tom’s comment on domain branding is really interesting. To add to the fun,ever wondered what’s with the web 2.0 thing and domain names? Omit those vowels and you got a fresh new 2.0 style domain. Flickr? Jaxtr?

Cheers to all the commenters, really appreciate them.

Moreover, .info is a top level domain name, unlike .co.uk, which is second level domain name.

I gain a lot of insight watching my nieces and my wife surf the net. They’re not technical at all and they behave like Jane User.

A little while back, I wrote a post on how, if you can’t the dot com that you want, you should look to other domains that might be used in spelling your site’s name. Here’s a list of country domains that might used to this effect: http://blog.searchanyway.com/2007/03/anyone_who_has_ever_gone.html

I’ve also read the long your register your domain for the better. Reminds me to get off my butt, pony up, and extend those registrations.

I think it’s a bit of an unfair rule to be honest. I have simply autorenewed my domains for years – should I be punished for it?

Spammers aren’t stupid – they will simply register their domains for longer.

‘Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.”

One can surmise from this statement that domains registered for longer periods give the indication (true or not), that their owner is legitimate. Based on the patent, Google is apparently attempting to use a domain’s length of registration when indexing and ranking a Web site for inclusion in their organic search results. If nothing else, it’s a great sales pitch for domain registrars.

If anything, I would reccomend people not to register their domain too far into the future because you never know, you might have sold it by then (make sure you have auto renewal on though).