Is hosting payment cycle considered by Google?

[silverbytes]

Domain name registration cycle is considered in google patent so you may take advantage paying in advance several years against just yearly.

Does the same happen with hosting payment cycle? Does generates more trust to pay 5 years than 1?

[LifeinAsia]

How would Google know how far in advance you have paid your hosting company?

[Receptional Andy]

Domain name registration cycle is considered in google patent so you may take advantage paying in advance several years against just yearly.

I think it is an overly simplistic view to assume that it is a positive signal to have a long domain registration period. If I were evaluating sites at extreme ends of the spam spectrum the short registration period of a "scraper" site would be additional confirmation that it was short-term spam - a negative signal. The short registration period of a major charity site would mean that...they were renewing annually.

For an in-between case, the 1 year renewal on a local newspaper website just means the person responsible for domain registrations is either inexperienced or not averse to unnecessary risk. It says nothing about relevance or quality.

Alone, domain registration period is nowhere near sufficiently reliable to be a worthwhile factor in and of itself. Search people sometimes call this type of thing a "noisy" signal - it's very tricky to isolate it as worthwhile to ranking search results.

As for hosting cycle, there is no possible way for Google to obtain this information for the overwhelming majority of websites. And even if they could, it is a cacophony of noise as far as an algorithmic criteria go. The period of hosting renewal says more about a company's accounts department than the quality and relevance of their website.

[aristotle]

I've seen suggestions that Google gives a site additional trust if it survives past its first "birthday", or one year from the time its nameservers were initially set. Of course this is conjecture, but I don't think it can be ruled out, and it's consistent with the idea that Google's trust in a site generally increases with its
age.

[silverbytes]

How would Google know how far in advance you have paid your hosting company?

Dunno but don't think that would be a problem for them, they do more complex things.

About registration cycle:. The idea is to doubt about domains registered to spam or to test. I personally find it helpful, and yes it is part of patent at least according to <snip: a small domain name blog> and probably many others saying the same.

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 9:20 pm (utc) on May 27, 2009]
[edit reason] Only certain types of links are permitted - see forum charter [/edit]

[LifeinAsia]

Dunno but don't think that would be a problem for them, they do more complex things.

I don't know about that- trying to get information that isn't readily available (if at all) outside of a company's accounting department sounds more complex than anything else they're doing. (I'm getting visions of bots that look like Tom Cruise spidering down into the locked offices of hosting companies around the world...)

[fishfinger]

If any of my providers were to tell a third party information about my account they wouldn't be my provider for much longer, and woudl be in breach of government legislation.

In the UK it's called the Data Protection Act and businesses are bound by it to keep customer information private and not divulge it to third parties except as required by law.