Interesting study Garrett - Thanks for bringing it to public attention.
IMO some of the very basic parameters of the study call the results into question, since they used only single word search terms (not a very likely scenario these days) and studied only terms which were not often searched for resulting in only getting data on how relatively unsophisticated pages were ranked which sheds no light on how the best constructed pages on the web fare.
It may be that this was done to eliminate the effects of other optimization strategies, but trying to study only what may be a minor factor in isolation make it very hard to draw relevant conclusions. For instance a more complete study might show that the effects of inbound anchor text are strong enough to mask any effects of keyword density, or that KW density just doesn't make enough difference to matter.
Some of the conclusions that are drawn from the data may not be correct however, for instance suggesting that the keyword in the URL is of ranking importance is stretching it a bit based on the information available. It would also be quite logical IMO to conclude that the top ranking pages are better optimized and better optimized pages will tend to use keywords in the domain name as a part of the general optimization scheme, than to conclude that the ranking is due to the keyword in the domain name.
But all in all a useful bit of information. Now if they could only do the same for optimized pages.
|