If you’ve been performing SEO on your company website, letting your domain name expire can literally become a nightmare!
Imagine it, you have poured your money, time, and energy into building an amazing online presence that has lead to company growth, money in the bank, and the feeling of crushing all the goals you set. Then, overnight, it all disappears! Why? Because you chose to ignore the expiring domains notice email that you thought was junk. Or, you put someone (a temp employee maybe or ex spouse) in charge of your company domain names and their necessary renewal payments. This happens more than many wish to admit!
Today, we want to share with you the importance of why you need to set up auto payments or make on-time payments for all of your domain name renewals!
It’s long been recognized in the SEO world that domain name registrations should be made for long periods of time. At Big Red SEO, we personally use and recommend Google Domains for domain registrations, but there are hundreds of domain registrars out there that are around the same price. It’s amazing what missing that $10-$15/year payment can do to search engine optimization for webpages!
When you miss the deadline for the expiration, the domain name is put back into an unregistered pool, at which time the domain name registrars redirect all pages from the site to a page with advertising and an option to purchase the domain.
This is all perfectly fine and well within the rights of the domain registrar, since after all, we didn’t renew the domain. There’s usually a 30 day grace period in which, if you really wanted to get your domain name back, you can just pay the registration fee and you’re back online within a few hours. If you miss the 30 day window, there’s often a redemption period in which you can still get your domain name back, but it’ll cost you a few more dollars.
The Consequences
Sadly, whatever work you had done on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get your website or webpage to rank higher in the search engines can be severely damaged once this happens. If a search engine such as Google happens to index or spider your page while the site is offline, you can quickly lose your SERP (search engine result page) position. Imagine being dropped from Google’s listing literally overnight!
Google doesn’t know that you forgot to pay your registration. All Google sees is that the content that was once there is no longer there and as a result, it should be no longer indexed and no longer in the search results page.
Your little $10 mistake can quickly become a multi-thousand dollar mistake when you now have to almost start over with your SEO campaigns to re-rank the pages for position. It is for those reasons that we highly recommend that people register a domain name for three to five years. You have the option to renew a domain for up to ten years, so if you know you’re going to be around in ten years, why not spend the $100 now and not worry about registration for a decade!
Contact Big Red SEO Today!
A little known fact is that Google actually pays attention to the domain expiration date, also. Google recommends having multiple year domain registrations and never letting your domain name have less than six months available before expiration date. While this is a very low ranking attribute to the Google Algorithm in ranking sites, every little bit helps!
Big Red SEO, a successful Omaha SEO Company, can help you with Search engine optimization to help keep your website at the top of the Google Results Page. Contact us today for a free consultation on SEO services.