3 Reasons Long-Term Domain Registrations Make Sense

If you have ever marketed your business online, chances are you’ve bought more than one domain name over the years. It’s important to periodically review all of your domains, even the old ones pointing to a micro-site promotion you ran eons ago. If you don’t, you may be losing out on traffic, money, or even worse, facilitating a brand catastrophe.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Reason #1. Simply put, your website could go “down.”
It is blatantly obvious that visitors won’t be able to access your website, except most people don’t consider the “collateral damage” of letting a domain name registration lapse. When your domain expires, not only is the website unreachable, but you stop receiving email. This means all business critical email communication has been severed, and your customers can’t communicate with you.

Not only does your email stop coming in, but customers can’t find the phone number prominently displayed on your website either. Chances are your phone has stopped ringing too.

If you have an e-commerce site, you’ll have zero orders coming in. Imagine if your domain expired on a Friday, or even worse, while you were on an extended vacation! Failure to spend ten minutes and few bucks on a domain registration could result in hundreds, or even thousands of dollars in lost revenue and productivity. Not to mention you and your company look sloppy due your lack of attention to detail.

Reason #2. Someone “steals” your customers.
Those old domains you used in the past have traffic, and value. They’ve more than likely been spidered by search engines, have old links from websites pointed to them, and I guarantee you there are folks out there who haven’t updated their bookmarks. These domain names might even contain one of your trademarks - your name, a product name, or a proprietary process term. Call me paranoid, but your competition could swoop in and grab that old domain, and in the process, all of the incoming traffic. Imagine the damage that might be caused by an unscrupulous competitor - they could re-establish old email addresses, damage relationships with existing clients, or even intercept new business leads meant for you.

I found a recent article talking about TIAA-CREF allowing an old micro-site domain registration to expire. They obviously didn’t
need it anymore, right? Wrong. A pornographer who happened to be paying attention picked up the domain. Suddenly anyone who “thought” they were going to a TIAA-CREF site was now presented with online sex chat. Wow. At this point, TIAA-CREF is looking at a whole new set of brand management challenges they never could have imagined. And it should have been avoided for a small price.

Reason #3. You may have less “trust” with the search engines.
It’s been debated for a while now whether or not search providers such as Yahoo! and Google look at the length of your domain registration when calculating your search ranking. A one year domain registration may save you a few bucks, but consider a search engine’s perspective; Does this domain (your company) appear to be a long-term viable website (your business), or just a spammer with a keyword-crammed landing page? Aside from not worrying about the issues I described above, a long-term registration demonstrates you are in business for the long haul. And if it is definitively revealed later that there is an advantage with the Yahoo! and Google algorithms, you’ve got it covered. Check one more thing off your SEO checklist.

So, what can you do to protect yourself?

Get Audited
Normally this is a bad thing, but in this case, it’s perfectly fine. Keep a spreadsheet of all the domains and sub-domains that you use, and what you used them for. Review your list periodically and make sure the domains are still in your control. If you keep your domains registered, you can re-use them later. If you aren’t going to re-use them, properly redirect them to other domains or create landing pages to inform your visitors on where they should go next.

You can check your domain’s expiration date by using a "Who-Is" tool, or by logging in to your registrar’s website.

Pencil Me In
Online services like Google Calendar, and offline programs like iCal and Outlook, make it easy to track your domain registrations. First, create a separate calendar just for domains, and put all of your domain name expiration dates in the calendar. Set alarms to notify you before your domain expires. For instance, set an alarm one month before your domain expires, and you’ll be reminded to go extend your registration. Creating a separate calendar allows you to hide the calendar from view, but still get alerted when your alarms go off.

Long Term Relationship
It’s a bit more expensive, but if you register all of your domains for multiple years, you then set one day a year to extend the registrations for all of your domains. This way you can extend each domain name by just one year, always staying ahead of the curve. For instance, a domain originally registered for three years and then extended every year for a single year, would always have an expiration date at least two years in the future.

With all of the negative things that can happen to your brand’s reputation, it makes good sense to go ahead and pull the trigger on that long-term domain name registration. We advise all of our clients to renew their domain for at least three years. It costs a few dollars more, but it saves everyone involved a lot of heartache down the road.