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Matt Cutts: My short answer is not too worry about that very much. Not very much at all, in fact.

Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrars that were sending around emails that saying, that said ah, “did you know, that Google gives you a bonus in rankings if you register your site for three or more years”.

And just to clarify that’s not based on anything we’ve said.

The only thing that might be coming from is that we did file a patent that basically said we could use historical data in our rankings.

So you could in theory look at how many years the site had been registered for, ah, just like you could look at the history of a site to say whether it’s high quality or low quality. But we have a lot of ideas, and we file a lot of patents, and that doesn’t mean that all of that gets used in our rankings.

So, I don’t want people to jump to the assumption just because we, you know, there was one patented filed in 2002, and 38 claims down somebody said “well you could look at how many years the site is registered for”, and to jump to the conclusion that we use that in our rankings.

So, my short answer is make great content. Don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for, ah, just because someone is sending you an email that says “Google does, or even may use this in rankings”, doesn’t mean you should automatically take it at face value.

What makes a really big difference is the quality or your site and the sort of links that you have pointing to you, not, is my site registered for 3 or 4 years, instead of 1 or 2.