This image shows a WHOIS report of my domain, along with registration and expiration dates that may or may not affect search engine ranking.

Does Domain Expiration Affect Search Engine Ranking?

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Some SEO’s have claimed for years that the length of time for which a domain is registered can impact a site’s search engine ranking. The theory is that domains registered for longer periods of time give Google a signal that they’re in it for the long-haul and are rewarded. Sites that re-register their domain ownership annually give Google a signal that they may be temporary and potentially spammy.

Domain registrars have latched on to this theory in order to make easy sales by claiming that multi-year registrations will provide an SEO rank boost.

But does the claim that domain expiration affects search engine ranking hold any weight?

The Truth: Domain Expiration (Probably) Doesn’t Effect SEO

The Domain Expiration SEO Myth was born from concern over a patent held by Google related to ranking websites based on historical data. Multiple representatives from Google have stated on several occasions that domain expiration it not a major ranking factor. Matt Cutts (formerly of Google) states,

The answer is to not worry about it that much… not very much at all in fact.

Google’s own John Mueller says,

A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates — how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time :-)

Cutts’ and Mueller’s answers leaves the door open to domain expiration being a factor, albeit a small one. A former member of Yahoo’s search team claims that domain expiration does matter.

In a Moz forum discussion one individual points out that any relationship between high-ranking sites and domain registration lengths is likely correlation, not causation. Sites with longer registration lengths are more likely to be mature sites with more resources allocated to optimization and producing quality content, and therefore have a higher ranking. But the length of registration isn’t a ranking factor itself: it’s just along for the ride.

Myth Status: “Eh… Maybe?”

With Google’s official stance being “don’t worry about it” with a side of ambiguity, and claims from other sources saying domain expiration could play a factor, we can’t mark this myth “busted.”  The best we can say is that domain expiration could play a small factor. With that in mind, maybe it’s time to consider other reasons to register our domains for longer periods. Here are a few of those reasons.

Longer Domain Registrations Often Come with Price Breaks

Registering a domain for multiple years at a time is often cheaper than re-registering the same domain year-after-year. Who doesn’t love saving money?

Longer Domain Registrations Means You’ll Save Time

Registering a domain for multiple years takes exactly as much time as registering for a single year.  You’ll save yourself literally tens of seconds annually by registering for several years at a time. Plus you won’t look foolish if you forget to re-register. Which leads us to the most important reason of all.

Missing Domain Renewal May Affect Your Ranking

Forgetting to renew your domain is embarrassing and costly. Even if you don’t forget to renew, other individuals could beat you to it and snipe your domain out from under you. There have been several high-profile instances of this happening.

Losing your domain even temporarily could have some pretty tragic effects on your site’s SEO. Googlebot and other spiders don’t take kindly to unavailable content, and even the slightest outage could leave you with long-term SEO ramifications.

Consider the implications of your register redirecting your domain to some default splash page and 404’ing every single one of your URL’s that Google has in their index.

Making sure your domain remains yours well into the future can eliminate this rare but potentially costly pain point.

Longer Domain Registrations: Better Safe Than Sorry

My parting wisdom would be this: unless your registering a domain you have no intention of using for more than a year, there’s no good reason not to purchase multiple years of domain registration. You’ll be protected from having your domain sniped. You’ll save some time and potentially some money. And on the off-chance that Google does look at domain registration and expiration dates as a ranking factor, you’ll get that ranking boost and avoid any potential penalty.

Resources:

When you're totally stuck on a programming problem, sometimes the best course of action is to quit.

Stuck on a Programming Problem? Just Quit.

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There comes a time in every developer’s existence when they find themselves stuck on a programming problem.  We’ve all been there:  blood-shot eyes, pulsing veins in our foreheads, and synapses dying at a rate unheard-of since that Robitussin dare you took your senior year of college.

In that moment when Stack Overflow and your own brain have completely let you down, what do you do?

You quit, that’s what.

That’s right: quit. If you’ve already beat your head against a wall for several hours, doing it more eventually stops being productive.

Get up. Step away from the screen. Do something else. Play a video game. Go for a walk. Work on another project. Write something. Build something. Make something. Cook something. Have a conversation. Write some perfectly useless code in a different programming language. 

Whatever you do, do something that shifts your mindset. It might take an hour. It might take a day.  It might take a week. But returning to a project with fresh eyes can make all the difference.

So next time you find yourself staring at the same lines of code a little to long, remember: be a quitter! (Just not, like, permanently. That’s just sad.)

WordPress Limits The Number of Items on a Menu

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I just ran into a problem on a client site: I went to add two new items to their primary navigation. The first was was successful.  And even though clicking save said it was successful, when the Menu tool refreshed and I refreshed the live page, the second item was missing.

WordPress doesn’t actually set a limit on the number of menu items you can have. It seems like it does though, since an never never actually occurs when it stops adding them.

Some Googling turned up this issue in the WordPress Bug Tracker. Apparently when you click Save WordPress returns every menu item as a separate request variable.  When you get to 89 menu items, the number of variables being sent passes the default limit set by PHP, and menu items 90 and beyond get ignored. While the fix suggested by the bugtracker didn’t help me, the solution was easy. I just added the following line to my site’s .htaccess:

php_value max_input_vars 2000

Adding that PHP configuration variable will override the default max_input_vars limit, which causes WordPress not to receive and therefore save menu items beyond 89.

How to Add a Business to CitySearch

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I’m in the process of doing some link-building for my business, and I noticed that some of my local competitors are listed in city and business listings that I’m not.  One is called CitySearch.

I debated whether or not it was worth the effort to get listed in this type of local business directory. In the end I decided I should. First off, my competition is there and I’m not.  Second, there is some SEO benefit to being listed in business and location-specific directories, since they often manage to rank higher for key search terms than the businesses in the listings they provide. So if folks search for “computer repair in mifflinburg” and get local business directories first, I probably want to be there.

CitySearch doesn’t have an Add Your Business button. So How, pray tell, do you get into their business listings?

How to Add a Business to CitySearch

According to CitySearch’s FAQ (now hidden away at the bottom of their About Us page),

Citysearch partners with InfoUSA for local business data. They offer an Express Update service that allows merchants to update their listing data as well as add new businesses. Once you’ve added your business please allow 1 – 2 months for the information to be on Citysearch. Find out more at: http://www.expressupdateusa.com. CitySearch FAQ

Once you discover this little nugget of truth, getting listed is actually pretty easy.  Follow the instructions below.

  1. Go to ExpressUpdate and create an account. If you’re like me and totally distrust services like this you’ll be wise to use a junk email account to register. Don’t worry: you can associate a different email address with the actual business listing.
  2. After you’ve registered go back to the home page and search for your business. If it finds it, great! Claim your business and make any changes it requires to keep it current. If not, follow along.
  3. If the search didn’t find your business, you’ll see a link to Add it Now. Click that link and you’ll be provided with a form to add all of you business information. Once that’s completed, you’ll have to verify via phone that you have permission to manage the directory listing for this business.
  4. After phone verification your listing will go into a verification state. Mine took a few hours, but eventually it was ready for me to claim.
  5. Go back to ExpressUpdate, login, and on your dashboard you’ll see a table of business listings you manage. Go ahead and click Claim. It will give you a phone number to call to complete the process.
.htaccess rewrite rules that impacted the search feature on my WordPress site.

IThemes Security Plugin and Dangerous Search Queries

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I’m a huge fan of iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security).  I’m such a fan, in fact, that I use it on many of my own sites as well as the WordPress sites that I manage for my current employer.  But anyone that’s used iThemes Security knows that sometimes it’s does a little too good a job and you eventually run into false positives and unintended consequences.

Today I ran into such a situation.  I manage 4 separate WordPress sites for distributor of industrial plumbing and HVAC components.  A client who was looking for a very specific part let them know that their site was crashing when he entered it into the search bar.

That part they needed was an insert.

What do we know about the word “insert” that might explain why only that search term was causing a problem?

We know that WordPress uses a MySQL database, and we know that an insert is a type of SQL query that writes to the database.

Could it be that iThemes is being helpful, and blocking requests to the site that look like they might be trying to write to our database?

The fact that I was seeing an Apache generated error page and WordPress wasn’t even trying to handle the request suggested that the problem happened before the request was ever passed off to the CMS. So I opened the .htaccess file for one of their sites, searched for the word insert, and found the offending lines.

Update: I’ve moved the code over to GitHub.

.htaccess rules applied by the WordPress IThemes Security plugin that cause the plugin to see legitimate search requests as "false positives" which block page rendering.
https://github.com/iambrianreich/IThemesFalsePositives
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Basically these rules cause Apache to drop requests with suspicious data in the query string. If you look closely, one of those rules includes words like request, contact, union, declare, and insert. Deleting the offending line from the .htaccess solved the problem.  I like the added protection these rules provide, so I only recommend removing them if they cause a problem.  These rules try to prevent hackers from sending malicious code to your website in the first place, so if some code in your WordPress install forgets to sanitize user data, you’re still somewhat protected.

I had to remove this rule because insert is actually the name of a product the client was selling through their site and blocking this search term could affect sales.  Before you remove these rules, weigh the pros and cons of your own situation.