I don’t know if this is actually useful or not, but I tried it a few weeks ago and my traffic is up.  Correlation != causation and all that aside, it only cost me about $8 so maybe you want to try it too.

WebsiteGrader, a project of Dharmesh Shah and the rest of the team at Hubspot, suggests that if you have a website domain registration which will expire in a year or less, then you may be penalized by search engines, which think you might be a fly-by-night spam site operator. 

Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a committment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website has not been setup as a temporary spam site.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had about half a year left on my registration.  When I read their inducement I went over  to GoDaddy and got myself another 2 years, plus prepaid my hosting for a year for a wee discount.  My rankings on Google et al are indeed up.  Again, I have no way of knowing whether that was caused by this tweak, and I have never heard this SEO tip on other sources of SEO information which I trust, so take it with a grain of salt.  That being said, if it isn’t true the most you are out is about $8 which you were going to pay eventually anyway, right?