Effect of Domain Name on Rankings

If I wanted to rank highly on a search term such as "how to play hop scotch" and I noticed that howtoplayhopscotch.com was available...would that help me in my rankings. For example would the effect of having a site where your domain name, title, and H1 tag being the keyword phrase exactly help you significantly in your ranking. Or is better just to focus on PR with a big site instead of adding specific domains?

how-to-play-hopscotch.com would probably help you more than howtoplayhopscotch.com.

While your domain name potentially can help your rankings, it's a tiny insignificant part compared to content, PR & good anchor text.

I have seen either way (with or without dashes) do quite a nice job of boosting your positioning. The only downfall is the way it looks. I hate sites that are keyword stuffed. I have a few clients that did this, though it works, it doesn't look that good.

Hi,

My experience is that it only has a very minor effect on rankings.

A disadvantage being that its harder to build a brand around a keyword.

Clare

I think beefcakejcc was also asking whether it is best to split up your site into more independent domains, or keep the topic-related pages under the same site (that would have a bigger PR and more inbound links pointing to one site).

I don't know the answer to this, but would be interested if anyone has noticed anything about it.

I've had good experience with subdomains -- I've had some pages perform better within a subdomain of an existing site, than as a new domain.

what would be an example of a sub-domain?

and yes Pompei got the better understanding of my question.

My site is on an independant server and I just found out that I can have up to 70 domain names. So I was wondering if it would be worth it to add a bunch of domains that were my the same as my keywords.

The idea was that a) I would be able to optimize each domain for the keyword and b) I could create about thirty or so sites that would all interlink and hopefully raise my PR.

a subdomain is this:

subdomain.domain.com

As far as doing what you said. You need to watch out. There was talk about Google penalizing linking schemes between same IP addresses. If that doesn't get you, I am pretty sure Google has decreased the power of PR with same IP address linking schemes.

Yeah I just read something about that in another thread a few minutes ago. I was thinking that was pretty common practice among design companies that had hundreds of clients. Would you say that there is a cutoff point where Google get's suspicious? For example right now I have two sites on the same independant server. They share tons of links because one site has free information and the other is mail order.

Do you have to purchase a sub-domain?

No, you do not have to pay for a subdomain. With crosslinking between sites, I would just recommend making sure that you do have a lot of outside links coming to your sites as well as the linking between the sites.

thanks....very helpful information. For someone just getting started it's interesting trying to get more hits/sales while making sure you don't do anything to piss Google off.

No problem....

I agree wih Axe that the boost is low and in my opinion insignificant.

When people link to you try get them to use proper words in the link text and keep the url clean.

If what I'm picking up from various posts is correct. It seems odd that anchor text would be more valuable than a domain name. With the exception of people just happening to type in the domain name with something like officedepot.com. You would think that would be the sure fire way to garner relevancy. But I guess that would also be an easy way to spam. For example some porn site buying guitarlessons.com and then redirecting the page.

Oh well. Shortcuts never work. I guess I just go find myself some IBLs

Its just some people's opinions. Some categories do well with branded names, others do well with keywords in the domains. Just look to your business area and see what domains are ranking well for the keywords you want to position high.

For example, if I was selling diamond jewelry and I had to choose between http://www.diamondjewelry.com and http://www.vetofunk.com, I would def take the first one.