Effect of Domain Name on Rankings

April 6th, 2004, 12:29 pm

And on a search for "diamond jewelry" at Google, diamondjewelry.com doesn't appear in the first 5 pages (walmart.com, however, does).

[vetofunk]

April 6th, 2004, 12:34 pm

Thats because they don't have me optimizing it

April 6th, 2004, 12:56 pm

lol...

But you see what I mean? The domain name itself, while it may have an affect on the results, it doesn't appear to be a huge one. Most of the brand-name domains are usually up there because they're optimized to some degree or other.

Even if it's purely by accident. If somebody's business name is the same as their domain name - fredswidgets.com, for example - and they have "Fred's Widgets" plastered all over their site, and "Fred's Widgets Homepage" links everywhere, chances are they're going to (eventually) come up #1 on a search for "Fred's Widgets".

If your business has more of a generic name, like "Power Tools", and you register powertools.com, the name may help you a tiny little bit, but it's all useless, and overriden by other sites that have more SEO, higher PR, if you don't put any more thought into it than that.

I believe that the specific brand name domains are #1 purely by coincidence, otherwise you'd have http://www.yoursearchquery.com coming up as the first result on ever search you do. Because of the reasons in the "Fred's Widgets" example above. If your business name (and domain name) is plastered all over every page, as it often is, you're going to eventually get pretty high.

To use your example, diamondjewelry.com, if you had "Diamond Jewelry - <product name here>" at the top of every page on your site, and a link at the bottom of your page that says...

Code: [ Download ] [ Select ]

This site is Copyright <a href="http://www.diamondjewelry.com">Diamond Jewelry</a> ©1066

That's obviously going to help.

Possibly domain name is a factor in how highly you rank (or perhaps even subdomain - is http://forum.yoursite.com going to rate higher or lower than http://www.yoursite.com/forum on a search for "your keyword forum" assuming all other things are equal?) but I feel it's an almost non-existent factor.

I just think too many inexperienced people see domain name as a huge factor and give it too much importance. Personally, I don't take search engines into consideration at all when picking a domain name. I pick something that's easy to remember, easy to repeat down the phone without being incorrectly spelled (hyphens missing, having a domain made up of 2 or more words where the last letter of one word is the same as the first letter of the following word, etc.), and could look neat in a fancy logo

[vetofunk]

April 6th, 2004, 1:57 pm

Axe, I totally agree with you. Many of my clients have branded names and do very well in the search engines. I think it just depends on the actual business area of your site. In the end, it is how good you optimize the site.

I am about to buy a domain name that has the actual keywords in the domain itself because every listing for the keywords I want has the keywords in the domain. This, combined with my optimizing should do me well. This is the domain name and idea that is gonna make me rich

April 6th, 2004, 2:01 pm

lol, good luck!

May 10th, 2004, 2:33 am

I had a discussion on the same subject in another thread. In my opinion the keyword rich URLs help A LOT in Google for my keywords. Nearly all the top 10 listings for my key phrase have keyword rich URLs. For example, for London Blue Widget:

http://www.London-blue-widget.com
http://www.blue-widget.com/London
http://www.adomain.com/london/blue/widget/
http://www.adomain.com/blue/widget/london
http://www.adomain.com/london-blue.widget.htm

et. etc.

The best way to find out is to search for your key phrase and to study the top entries.

Good luck...

May 26th, 2007, 12:23 pm

Yes Keyword phrases definetly help a lot. There was a whole argument on http://www.domainpeeps.comabout which is better and in my opinion It is better to own "IceCreamScoops.com" if you are selling ice cream scoops rather than harvey industry.com ect.

May 27th, 2007, 5:51 am

The thing about keywords in domain names is this: It may not be as significant as optimised content or loads of good incoming links, but when you are doing SEO what you are trying to do is gain competitive advantage.

If you have good keywords in your domain name then those keywords form part of the URL for every page on your site and, all other things being equal, that has got to help!

But beware of buying up domain names thinking that they are the magic bullet to search engine success...

Oh - and you don't need hyphens - all the search engines can parse keywords in the domain name without help from hyphens - but it's good to avoid ambiguity. I have a parked site Who Reads .com - which was picking up some strange advertising, until I realised it could also be parsed as Whore Ads...