Keyword based domain-name registration and SEO

[Christof]

I had a conversation today with one of Australia's largest domain name registration companies - melbourneIT

They have an SEO program running where they encourage business owners to register lots of domain names with keywords, each related to the industry they target. For example, the popular keyword, "catering services melbourne" is used to create "www.cateringservicesmelbourne.com.au" (cost, $140).

They then offer hosting and a single keyword optimised content page with key phrase anchor text optimisation to the business owner's real website (another $195 ea.) So in effect they're creating open doorway pages with thematic content and links out to help boost the rankings of the customer's site for various search terms and phrases.

MelbourneIT are selling tons of domain names using this system and enjoying some premium hosting prices to boot!

Has anyone else tried this and has it worked for you?

Cheers

Chris

[dburdon]

Christof,

looks very spammy to me. If Google catch them a whole load of businesses could find they've paid $140 for nothing.

[collusion]

I agree it may look like spam BUT the old definition of doorway pages are really content pages and search engines did not care as long as you limit to only one doorway page. More than that is considered spamming. Matter of fact I read that in Yahoo's TOS about 2 years ago.

[cyanide]

Marketing Hype.

Looks like they're playing up the popularity of seo, but targetting people who realize that search engine ranking is important, but are also not well-versed in seo.

Anyone serious about seo, will either hire a pro or do the research themselves, and not pin their seo hopes on a domain registrar....

[chadhaajay]

Hello,

I'd say that keywords in domain name play an imporant role to get the websited listed in top ranks. But this is not all. Site content should be earch engine optimized as well in order to keep you in top 10 results on major search engines.

So, keywords in domain + seoptimized website content + keywords in webpage filenames + valid html statndards = A Well deserving top 10 site rank.

We have also purchased http://www.knowledgebase-script.com domain name for our product "php knowledge base script" and we have been quite successfull in getting it on the top 10 results in MSN, Yahoo and Google.