Domain name vs Content

[sparky]

I asked in a different thread if a domain name that started with the word 'The' could ever be ranked number one if someone searched that particular domain name. I asked this due to the word 'the' is a stop word and is dropped from the Google search. I also asked to bring up another point. If you have a domain name that is also a competitive keyword, you will be ranked number one no matter what content you have on your page. True?
Well for everyone that is saying false I ask you please to do this.

1. Please do a Google search for " sexy shoes "
2. Now click on the number one ranked site for that search. 'sexyshoes.com'
3. View the page source.

Please notice the tags 'title, description, Keywords'. Also please notice the content that is on the page or the lack there of. And I ask why is this site pulled number one? It is only due to their domain name?

With that thought one could suggest that content is not king in this case. But having the right domain name is.

Now yes everyone knows content is king. I wanted to point this out as this is a keyword we have been trying to rank for and it a little upsetting when you see things like this.

Searches done in January 2007 Count Search Term 29708 sexy shoes <Results from Overture>

I posted a new thread due to the thread where I first asked this would bring it off topic. If you wish to read that thread though it can be found here
http://www.webproworld.com/marketing...-new-post.html

[cw1865]

Originally Posted by sparky

Now yes everyone knows content is king. I wanted to point this out as this is a keyword we have been trying to rank for and it a little upsetting when you see things like this.

Searches done in January 2007 Count Search Term 29708 sexy shoes <Results from Overture>

I posted a new thread due to the thread where I first asked this would bring it off topic. If you wish to read that thread though it can be found here
http://www.webproworld.com/marketing...-new-post.html

Sparky, when you see things like what? That x number of seaches were done for a particular keyword?

Frankly, the websites that I am running that contain a generic keyword in the name of the website all do well.

At the beginning of the thread you were discussing the word 'the' - but then I kind've lost your train of thought there. How do you think 'the' works into the 'sexy shoes' key phrase?

SEXY-SHOES-USA.COM is available!

How about that name? Grab it before I squat on it and make a quick hundred bucks off of you.....

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by sparky

With that thought one could suggest that content is not king in this case. But having the right domain name is.

No and No. In this case have the right back links is key. Sure content can lead to getting the right back links long term and I suggest you create good content to attract links. The domain itself has VERY little to do with ranking for keywords. This is easy to tell just by looking at a few queries and seeing the domains that rank.

[ExtravagantMedia]

There are a couple of reasons for this. 1. The key phrase is long tail. A more heavily trafficked key phrase may or may not score the top listing depending on keyword difficulty and the competitor authority. 2. Google assigns serious weight to domain names and the closer you are to an EXACT match for whatever key phrase you are pursuing, the better off you are. 3. It is very possible for an authority site to out rank a site with the exact key phrase match. Therefore content is still king. This is however one of the more compelling reasons as to why I own over 4000 domains, now if only I had the time to develop them!!!

[sparky]

This was a continuation of the question I asked in a different thread concerning the stop word 'the'. In short I was asking if the domain 'theflowershopnetwork' could ever be ranked number one if someone searched 'theflowershopnetwork' since 'the' is a stop word and is dropped from the Google search. For the most part the answer is no. What I'm getting at is a person is always ranked number one for their own domain name "unless it starts with the word "the" since no one can be more relevant. This is what brought me to "sexy shoes" .

Originally Posted by cw1865

Sparky, when you see things like what? That x number of searches were done for a particular keyword?

yes the searches were done for the search term "sexy shoes"

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

No and No. In this case have the right back links is key. Sure content can lead to getting the right back links long term and I suggest you create good content to attract links.

I have to disagree. Links help your PR and PR has nothing to do with the SERPS. I have seen pages with PR one rank higher in the SERPs over pages with much higher PR.

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

The domain itself has VERY little to do with ranking for keywords.

Since no one can be more relevant and always ranks number one for their own domain name, how can it have very little to do with it?

Originally Posted by ExtravagantMedia

There are a couple of reasons for this. 1. The key phrase is long tail. A more heavily trafficked key phrase may or may not score the top listing depending on keyword difficulty and the competitor authority.

Since you alway rank number one for your own domain, wouldn't you say you are an authority for your own domain? Hence incredihelps sig file "kbkmarketing.com". He is the authority on kbkmarketing since he owns the domain. And he will always be ranked number one for the search term of kbkmarketing right?

Originally Posted by ExtravagantMedia

2. Google assigns serious weight to domain names and the closer you are to an EXACT match for whatever key phrase you are pursuing, the better off you are.

Very true and that is what I'm getting at.

Originally Posted by ExtravagantMedia

3. It is very possible for an authority site to out rank a site with the exact key phrase match. Therefore content is still king.

How? Since they own the domain they are automatically an authority, and will always rank number one for their own domain name.

My argument "for lack of better words"

If the domain "sexyshoes" put up content on let's say railroads, they would still rank number one for the search phrase 'sexy shoes' because of the serious weight that is put on by owning the domain name. No matter much I keyword or put relevant content on my page to rank for this keyword, I can never be ranked #1 as I can never become more relevant than a domain that is an exact match for that keyword.

Content takes a back seat if your domain name is an exact match.

Never get a domain with the word 'the' at the beginning, because you can never be ranked #1 for your domain name. And try to get a domain that uses a keyword that you are going after.

CW1865 - As far as your idea of getting the domain sexy-shoes-usa.com, you will see that sexy-shoes.com is taken, but it does not rank #1 even if you do a search for sexy-shoes because google drops the hyphen like they drop the word 'the', hence never get a domain that is hyphenated. When sexy-shoes was searched, sexyshoes.com was still ranked #1 because Google drops the hyphen.

Which brings me back to my original point that domain names vs. content...content takes a backseat if your domain name is an exact search. It does not matter if your page is relevant to it or not.

Incredihelp - I assumed that you own kbkmarketing.com as it is in your sig file. If you do not own it, please accept my apology for saying that you did.

[ExtravagantMedia]

I hear what your saying about EXACT match in a domain name, however I've experienced otherwise. I would say it's true 95% of the time but go register a domain with a key phrase that has strong competition and key phrase difficulty and I think you'll find it somewhat difficult to rank still. I would say that in 95% of cases the domain owner is the authority but not always.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by sparky

I have to disagree. Links help your PR and PR has nothing to do with the SERPS. I have seen pages with PR one rank higher in the SERPs over pages with much higher PR.

When did I say toolbar PR has to do with anything? Never. Most on this forum know that.

Originally Posted by sparky

Since no one can be more relevant and always ranks number one for their own domain name, how can it have very little to do with it?

LOl, what in the world are you talking about here? if i wanted to i could rank in the top ten for you company name with a page and domain having nothing to do with the keyword being targeted. Domains mean very little in the overall ranking factors.

[ExtravagantMedia]

incredihelp that was lethal ouch. Sparky, we hear what you are saying about domains but you are very misinformed about how they 100% of the time will outrank a specialist. Your getting those results because you are registering domains that have exact match long tail keyphrases and there is no competition or keyword difficulty. incredihelp, I think you underestimate domain weight but you most certainly are correct. The truth is really somewhere in the middle. Sparky thinks its 100% about the domain, and you think its not even a factor. I think domains play an important role but certainly not the only role.

[incrediblehelp]

Just telling it straight Extravagant Media

[bijan814]

Domain name is a factor for search engine results, but it doesn't mean u will get rank first. Other factors are involve too.

[Big Juice]

The domain is over 10 years old and it would appear that the person renews the domain for long durations.

The domain name can help but it ain't the be all end all to gaining top ranking for a term.

If it were then most of us who dont-have-keyword-specific-domains-would-be-shit-out-of-luckdotcom.

[mindprint]

A domain name with the exact wording as a popular search phrase can often do well because of the text in the backlinks. For example, if two sites sell 'shoes', and one site is sexyshoes.com and the other is footstuff.com, the links back to them might be something like:

<a href="footstuff.com">Foot Stuff</a> - a site selling sexy shoes.

<a href="sexyshoes.com">Sexy Shoes</a> - a site selling sexy shoes.

footstuff.com will most likely do better on a search for "foot stuff" and sexyshoes.com will do better with the search "sexy shoes". Not necessarily because of the domain name, but as a result of the way other sites link back. This is one of the reasons I prefer having the the domain name with a popular search phrase.

[jdsalr]

to answer your 'the' question....

do a search for the word: nation

there are lots of 'the' domains ranked number one. also try: scientist

not only does it start with 'the', it also has a hyphen in it, for all you 'hyphen-haters' ;0)

[Linknz]

Hi Sparky,
from my side of this the answer is simple, a sites name doesn't make any difference to how well it scores, we use a complex algo that looks at a sites design and content on which to score a site.
If a site was called say "Dogs nuts dot com" then it doesn't mean it will contain information about what the sites name implies so we as a search engine simply ignore the domain name when we are scoring it.
In a way if a site is called "best hosting dot com" then it doesn't mean they are the best hosting site to us it's just a name.

The purchase and choice of a domain name is only good when it comes to people remembering the name or using it.
Having said that just looking at our log files it shows that visitors may be slightly more willing to click and visit a site that has a name related to what was being searched for.

[jetskiron]

about the hyphen in domain name comments, I thought the hyphens were desirable because it made it easier for search engines to find the keywords? I'm a newbie.

[Linknz]

Originally Posted by jetskiron

about the hyphen in domain name comments, I thought the hyphens were desirable because it made it easier for search engines to find the keywords? I'm a newbie.

Hi Jetskiron,
we stopped using keywords from within a sites name ages ago, this is because our webspiders have got heaps better and we no longer have any problems finding a sites content.
We do run quite advanced diagnostic software built into our search engines web spider as we index websites, this shows us the quality of the sites design and i the links it has are accurate or not.

[brian-ilp]

Originally Posted by sparky

Never get a domain with the word 'the' at the beginning, because you can never be ranked #1 for your domain name.

My experience is different. I have a website with both Thekeyword.com and keyword.com
When I search on keyword it is the domain Thekeyword.com that ranks Nr.1
When I search on Thekeyword I also get Thekeyword.com as Nr.1
No sign of 'The' damaging the Google SERP.

[jackall]

Hi Sparky

Okay - so the title and domain name match, there should be a strong trust rank with the age of the site, but maybe the 2,740 backlinks to the site aren't doing it any harm...

[known]

Hi all -

I have the domain Known Books and known.com of Suttons Bay - Devoted to the Joys and Luxury of Books and Reading and when you do a search for the word "known" on Google 479 million search results are rendered. I am usually in spot number one and sometimes I drop back to position two - answers.com with one of their topic directories and I toggle back and forth between position one and two almost daily.

I am in the process of changing the direction and dynamics of the site.

This is an interesting thread - I've been buying up a lot of long tail domain names and have begun the process of experimenting with how sites rank based upon these domain names. Some I've owned for years and didn't do a thing with them but hold them. It is too soon to post any type of conclusion about them, but I decided after I saw the unique traffic they attracted when I parked them with Sedo it was time to either create new sites, blogs, or to institute some web forwarding to my main site.

Cheryl C. Cigan
Known Books
Known Books and known.com of Suttons Bay - Devoted to the Joys and Luxury of Books and Reading

Make it Known!

[Orion]

with google..
1. Content
2. Backlinks
3. is there a third? lol nah seriously IMHO clean coding / symantecs etc.
somewhere between 5 and 10. Domain name havin keywords in it...

in between is everything like length of time online etc.

yes it helps definitely but it's not huge...

when picking a domain name far more important than keywords is the ease with which your site visitors can remember the domain name and spell it correctly. short and simple brings traffic back over and over again. If you can do that with keywords in it WOOOHOOO! Dat be a great thing.

[sandwalker]

Links to your site are the #1 key to getting excellent pagerank - domain name is way secondary to the number of links going to your website. Look at Wikipedia.com or Monster.com or Yahoo.com or Google.com . Their rankings are based strictly on the number of links going to them. Domain Name has very little to do with anything. It's nice to target a long-tail keyword in a domain name but really - get backlinks first and foremost and your ranking will skyrocket. By the way, the backlinks do not necessarily have to be related specifically to your website keywords. That may change at some point in the future.

sandwalker

[jonisolis]

>CW1865 - As far as your idea of getting the domain sexy-shoes-usa.com, you will see that sexy-shoes.com is taken, but it does not rank #1 even if you do a search for sexy-shoes because google drops the hyphen like they drop the word 'the', hence never get a domain that is hyphenated. When sexy-shoes was searched, sexyshoes.com was still ranked #1 because Google drops the hyphen.

I have a web site named: horse-logos.com with a hypen. When you do a google search for horse logos the first site listed is my other website named: alove4horse.com and there is a horselogos.com site but they do even show up on the first page of the search. horse-logos.com is ranked third.

[s360]

I agree with domain age factor and its not a competitive keyword.

[astro]

Brain hurts reading this thread. Just for the record I have a domain name with a hypen and it ranks on the first page under many search terms, often 1 and 2 or 3 and 4.

The problem here is, it is not an exact science, there is no single formula for success and we cannot all be No1, most of the advice is good or I can see the logic.................but.............

What ever happened to the three word search term rule? Out to pasture now? Retired?

Try putting them in your title and site description and on the page in header cells, then with a generic domain name added to the recipe, plus a dash of meta tagging keywords in the graphics then slow cook for a few days, sit back and watch it rise!

I notice G.com now picks up any page changes within hours.

Just a thought or two
</astro>

[garyglow]

Originally Posted by sparky

Never get a domain with the word 'the' at the beginning, because you can never be ranked #1 for your domain name. And try to get a domain that uses a keyword that you are going after.

Well damn I must be screwed then However, when I do a search for my website THETicketLodge .com , I rank higher than ticketlodge.com. Perhaps because its just a parked domain.

That said, say I acquire the above mentioned website, what strategy should I take? Should I just redirect it to my theticketlodge.com site? Vice versa?

[Kate Lennon]

As I said in a previous post, imo the domain name is the single most important factor in getting found at or near the top of search results. It's at least 90% of the whole ball game. If you're in the business of selling classic cars and you own the domain "www.classiccars.com", your website will almost certainly turn up in the first page or two of Google search results - pretty much regardless of how many inlinks it has, or any other factor. If the title amplifies the domain name - eg, "Classic Cars - Hundreds of classic cars for sale" - the listing is even more likely to appear on page 1 of search results.
If you have a few good inlinks and your site is reasonably well optimized, all the better. But the domain name far outweighs all these other factors, in my experience.

Incidentally, I just used the classic car example off the top of my head, and just now I did a Google search for "classic cars". Guess what website (domain) turned up at position 1, page 1?

[Orion]

Kate...

what you're basing this on is that those nice wonderful domain names that contain the keywords like that were bought years ago (in most cases) and have TONS of backlinks...
Purchasing a new domain name really won't give you a great rank.. it's content and IBLs and all the other stuff.. the keyword domain name is nice to have and can help but it's very very low on priority..

[JAugusto]

I had a domain, two keywords, medium niche that ranked number without any inbound link what-so-ever!!

That was a year ago.

Recently, I bought and build an indentical site to that one and could not perform the same trick. But to my surprise, this time it was Yahoo who did it. (copying G old algo?!)

So, it's not an exact science.

I think it depends on having been previous keywords about that or not (yes, it was new), so Google must have thought I was the owner of the product and it makes sense.

I think in the future G will give more and more weight to domains!

Think about it! Would you spend $10.000 on SexyShoes.com just to SPAM or MFA from it?!

Google could not have a better guarantee than that.

[Kate Lennon]

Ron,
I've put two websites online in the last couple of years - one just a few months ago - and they both went straight to page 1 of Google search results for popular, generic terms, without ANY links back to them. The main reason - in my opinion, anyway - was because the domain names themselves (both dot coms) were popular key terms. And they are both in a highly competitive market (property in Spain).
I agree that most of the really good domain names have already been taken, but it's still possible to find good ones. One of the domain names referred to above was bought at the normal price; the other was bought for several thousand dollars in a private sale. So yes, it is sometimes necessary to pay a bit to get the domain name you want; but the site in question earned several times the amount paid for the domain name within the first few weeks of going online. It's worth it to pay for an exceptional domain name, if one is available.

[Kate Lennon]

PS - -

"Purchasing a new domain name really won't give you a great rank.. it's content and IBLs and all the other stuff.. the keyword domain name is nice to have and can help but it's very very low on priority.."

I know that what you're saying is the conventional wisdom, but it just has not been borne out by my own experience launching and managing websites for the last eleven years. Far from being "low priority", the domain name is the single most important factor when it comes to being found in search results. You're welcome to disagree, but there is abundant proof of this if you bother to look. And I didn't say that the domain name has any effect on page rank. I don't believe it does: but on the other hand I've never seen any evidence to suggest that PR has any bearing on where a site turns up in search results. Yes, I know it's supposed to - but it doesn't.

[mtuba4u]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

No and No. In this case have the right back links is key. Sure content can lead to getting the right back links long term and I suggest you create good content to attract links. The domain itself has VERY little to do with ranking for keywords. This is easy to tell just by looking at a few queries and seeing the domains that rank.

Take the domain isimangaliso.com registered by the iSimanagliso wetlands park in KZN Soutrh Africa.

they have no content, but ther rank at no 1 fore the key word "isimangaliso"

the html code of their page ====

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/aspl; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META name="keywords" content="">
<META name="description" content="">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="Author" content="Webhouse South Africa">

</head>

<body bgcolor="#808080">

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="826" align="center">
<tr>
<td><a href="mailto:wetlandinfo@mweb.co.za"><img src="/layouts/cust_iSimangaliso/grafx/splashpage.jpg" width="826" height="633" alt="" border="0"></a></tr>
</table>

</body>
</html>

so where does the fairness and openness come into this picture ?

is there any way that we can complain about this to GOOGLE ?

a page with no content and no meta tags rates at number one purely for the domain name!!!

take a look at the code above,,, this site ranks at number one for the word isimangaliso...

other sites are well optimised and only get ont page 4 or 5.

how does this fit the picture?

[mtuba4u]

Having your keywords as part of the URL of page will help place that particular page higher for those specific ley words in SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) but may not affect the PR (Page Rank)

Thinking that PR or page rank is of minor importnace as far as SERP's are concerned is a dangerous thing, but often you find your SERP's are not influenced by page rank, which is confusing.

The real problem is the actual number of variables that are used to calculate PR and SERP's are very different and the algorythms are also rather divergent.

PR is used to calculate your SERP's whilst your key words, page content and inbound links are the prime focus of SERP's.

PR is derived from a vast number of variables including relevance of all pages to your site as a whole, key word density, key word proximity, URL names, position of a page in your site structure, positionof your page in the folder lay out of your site, the names of adjacent folders in the sites lay out, and many other strangely related variables.

Most of these variables also affect the SERP's but in different propotions and different areas of the mathematical equation used to determine the various scores allocted to your pages at different stages of the evaluation process.

these are all confusing, and different people will tell you differnt things from their perspective.

you do need to evaluate your site yourself and make changes that have been proved by others. Testing search engine responses should not be done on working domains as these experiments may cause your site to be banned from SERP's instantly, and black marked for future evaluations, that your pages may never recover from.

having your key words in your domain name helps tremendously, and you should always try to get your primary key word into the URL name for any specific page.

this may be accomplished by naming your folders correctly, or by creating subdomains with the relevant key words as the lead in.

example = keyword.yousite.com/aother keyword/keyword.htm

this works well, but you do need to be aware of keyword stuffing at all times. using synonyms is also very effective for english sites only at this tage of the game.

what do you want ? GOOD SERP's or good page ranks.

I know that I do not give two hoots about PR as long as my pages are located easily by search engines and feature well in SERP's.

[Neil S Graham]

[QUOTE=mtuba4u;355952]Take the domain isimangaliso.com registered by the iSimanagliso wetlands park in KZN Soutrh Africa.

they have no content, but ther rank at no 1 fore the key word "isimangaliso"
--------------------

What you have here is a page without the term isimangaliso but at least one site linking to this site that does contain the term.

Look at Googles Cache of the page and you will see this.

I have noticed this before with a terrible site that ranks number one for exactly the same reason. This site designed a splash page with virtually no spiderable content but a backlink contained the term. Bingo number one.

So it looks like back links are way up there in the search engine optimisation stakes.

Neil

[Mrjupp]

Having a generic name is an absolute must. Failing that the next best thing is to ensure that the emphasised keyphrase (the main keyphrase) features in the title tag...eg. Really Wicked - The Website For Really Wicked Gifts. Now do a search for really wicked gifts and reallywicked.co.uk should do well.

Same on generic names alone for sites such as martialartsmovies.co.uk when if you do a generic search for a reasonably popular niche term like martial arts movies the domain comes out on top nine times out of ten with just the occasional dip. Just a couple of my sites that feature well in the search engines through name association and use of the tags in an appropriate way.

Content still matters though and I have generic domains with poor content that are not number 1 on google but still feature highly. They'd have top spot with decent content to complement the title tag and h1, h2 tags.

Google's aim to display sites with "relevance" will mean that generic domains will always do well but only for the specific keyphrase that refers to the domain. The rest will be down to title tag additions, keyword relevancy and quality content.

[DrTandem1]

The reason it is number one is that there are hundreds of IBLs pointing towards it with the anchor text of sexy shoes. There is no mystery here.

[sparky]

First thank you all for replying

But I would like to get down to brass tacks for a second.

Google is the number one SE why? Because they give the best relevant page results for your search, or do they?

Now, if you look closely Google took the description for the SERPs from DMOZ. let stop there a sec and talk about them.

DMOZ, the god of directories. Oh please! Maybe a few years ago, but today their Mod to Category ratio stinks. It is impossible to get a listing updated, and worse yet to even get listed at all. Sure there is a 'Submit a site' form you can fill out but 'the Mods want to find the site themselves', so this does not do any good either. And what happens if you are not listed with DMOZ? Looking at the weight Google puts on this ill running directory, it is almost imperative that you are.

So back to Google. They took the description from DMOZ and put it with the submitted site domain name and bam ranked it number one. While never looking at the content...
Now there has also been a lot of talk here on the forums about bad neighborhoods and who we should link to and how Google looks at these links. In short the people we link to is looked at as people we put trust in. And depending on who we link to is dependent on if we get classified as a bad neighborhood and penalized by Google. Ok let's see who Google puts there trust in. DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory I would say are the top two. We already talked about the running of DMOZ or the lack there of. So this brings us to Yahoo. Now since Yahoo really plays no part in this, I'm not going to go into them, but I would like to point out an older thread that was started by Webnauts. Now this thread is not 100% on topic here, but it does point out the weight Google puts on Yahoo and is also a classic case of Google do as I say not as I do " Yahoo Thread ". Now I do not want to get into Google bashing and it is so easy to get side tracked when talking about Google so I will try and just sum it up by asking.

How can Google claim to give you the best relevant page results when it puts it trust in old, out dated, and ill running directories? How can it say this when they did not look at the content of the page?

[sparky]

Originally Posted by DrTandem1

The reason it is number one is that there are hundreds of IBLs pointing towards it with the anchor text of sexy shoes. There is no mystery here.

You are absolutely right. Incredihelp also pointed this out. I 100% agree that IBLs help determine page relevancy. I am also well aware that your inbound links also help PR. Taking PR out of the picture as it plays no part in the SERPS, and only dealing with the page relevancy, based only on this, I would understand why this page is ranked #1. But a site cannot control who links to them. The page relevancy ought to play a weighted factor, but content still should be king. If you do not have the content on the page to support the page relevancy, you should not be ranked in this position. I am sure your site has hundreds, if not thousands of IBLs. I am also sure that not all of the IBLs are relevant to your site. So if you run a SEO site, and you have 500 IBLs coming in from automotive sites, does this make you relevant to an automotive site? This is why I don't believe this site in particular should be ranked #1.

IBL relevancy + domain name relevancy + trusted directory relevancy = #1

IBL relevancy + domain name relevancy + trusted directory relevancy + sites title, description and keyword relevancy + page content relevancy = #1

I just don't agree with the top equation.

Also Google wants links from relative sites and I'm willing to bet that over half of their IBL come from blogs, forums and directories or internal linking from sites that have no relevancy to their site. Although the anchor text states 'sexy shoes', the site it is coming from is not relative so the link should not be counted or at least downgraded.

[joncase]

Hi All,
Here is a test I did.
Searched GoogleRankings for a web site called www dot keywestrealestate dot com, using the search term, "key west real estate".
It does not show up in the first 40 placements. It should be #1 according to this "domain name theory".

Did an actual G search for "key west real estate". On the first four pages there aren't any domain names with all those 4 search words in them in any order, let alone the exact order.

I'm with Incrediblehelp. Text links with the key words as the link are more powerful.

[ExtravagantMedia]

Try my site SEOKeywordsNews.net
search "seo keywords news" without the quotes.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by sparky

I have to disagree. Links help your PR and PR has nothing to do with the SERPS. I have seen pages with PR one rank higher in the SERPs over pages with much higher PR.

Where in the world did you get the erroneous idea that PR has nothing to do with SERPs?

PR is central to the Google algorithm and the basis of their patent.

Originally Posted by sparky

Which brings me back to my original point that domain names vs. content...content takes a backseat if your domain name is an exact search. It does not matter if your page is relevant to it or not.

Specious logic. How often is a domain name exactly the same as a competitive search term? And how often is the content of a site entirely unrelated to the domain name and the searched term? How are you coming to these conclusions? They are neither logical nor based on facts.

Originally Posted by joncase

Hi All,
Here is a test I did.
Searched GoogleRankings for a web site called www dot keywestrealestate dot com, using the search term, "key west real estate".
It does not show up in the first 40 placements. It should be #1 according to this "domain name theory".

Did an actual G search for "key west real estate". On the first four pages there aren't any domain names with all those 4 search words in them in any order, let alone the exact order.

I'm with Incrediblehelp. Text links with the key words as the link are more powerful.

Thank you, Jon. And to all who believe that keywords in domain names have any particular weight, please pay attention to Jon and to Inc'Help.

Any focus on keywords in domains is a waste of time. They can help a bit, but only a bit.

[zbatia]

>>. Google assigns serious weight to domain names and the closer you are to an EXACT match for whatever key phrase you are pursuing, the better off you are.

I want to confirm that this is a case. I used to concern over the names of the domains that would include the major keywords, and therefore tried to use "-" between keywords but then I found that Google senses the keyword inside of a long domain name that has no dashes.

[JAugusto]

What would you say about this:

Would you spend $10.000 on SexyShoes.com just to SPAM or MFA from it?!

Google could not have a better guarantee than that, right?!

[ExtravagantMedia]

Zbatia correctomundo dude
There are three valid reasons to add a hyphen.
1. The domain you want is taken without the hypen.
2. You are out to monopolize the domain market for your given key phrases.
3. You want to seperate the words in the domain to make it more readable to the users eye.

[Kate Lennon]

"Here is a test I did.
Searched GoogleRankings for a web site called www dot keywestrealestate dot com, using the search term, 'key west real estate'.
It does not show up in the first 40 placements. It should be #1 according to this 'domain name theory'.

No, because there are too many words in the title. Once you go over 2 words, the search becomes diluted. If it were only one or two words, the site would almost certainly turn up in the first page or two of Google searches (not necessarily in position 1 of page 1 - I never said that).

I've just Googled "key west real estate" and guess what? The first listing - #1, page 1 - is keywest.com. Which is precisely what I would have expected.

[mjtaylor]

Keywest.com comes up #1 for almost any listing with the words key west in it. It is probably the oldest domain in Key West and I would bet $1,000 has more backlinks to it than any other key west domain.

So, that does not support your idea. Nor does dilution have anything to do with it.

Kate, getting what you would expect has nothing to do with why you got it - ie almost nothing to do with what words are in the domain.

It is important that this is made clear so that others are not misled by those who are misinformed.

[wige]

Originally Posted by Kate Lennon

I've just Googled "key west real estate" and guess what? The first listing - #1, page 1 - is keywest.com. Which is precisely what I would have expected.

Its even better than that - the number one result in full is Real Estate in Key West - KEY WEST PARADISE Travel Guide to Key West, Florida

Now just think if they called the page real-estate.html...

Of course, the fact that the site has some very prominent and relevant sites probably plays just as much a role in this, if not more. Google looks at thousands of factors to determine ranking, but the first test is relevance as determined by the content on the page and content off the page surrounding and contained within links to the page. We know that either one of these factors can outweigh the other, but it seems that the most weight is given to off page relevance - if that were not the case, the Miserable Failure Googlebombing attack would not have worked. If as suggested above the actual page had to be relevant to the search term, the attack would never have worked.

The original patent seems to me to relate mostly to spam. In creating the PageRank system, Google indicated a basic distrust in webmasters. The patent indicates that ranking is determined by on page relevance, then influenced by off page link quantity and quality, which itself is a measure of link quantity. This has changed since, so that ranking is now determined by on page and in link relevance, influenced by link quantity and quality. This means outside links now affect two different parts of the linking process for Google. It seems as though with every iteration of the algorithm Google looks more to outside sources to influence site ranks.

[Kate Lennon]

mjtaylor - - "Kate, getting what you would expect has nothing to do with why you got it - ie almost nothing to do with what words are in the domain.
It is important that this is made clear so that others are not misled by those who are misinformed."

If others are being misled, it is by yourself and others here who think they know what they're talking about but really don't. Every website I've worked on or launched over an 11-year period - bar one, and I know the reasons for that - is on page 1 of Google search results for the most competitive search terms. And it has very little to do with inbound links, and everything to do with choosing the right domain name.

"Keywest.com comes up #1 for almost any listing with the words key west in it.."

That's right. Maybe it has something to do with the domain name, and nothing at all to do with the fact that the site has been around a long time and so has a lot of backlinks. There are thousands of other sites in the same category as this one that have been around for just as long. Why aren't they on page 1 of Google search results? Why haven't they got thousands of back links?

Cart before the horse. Sites that are prominent in search results tend to get a lot of inbound links. And sites with strong, generic domain names tend to appear near the top of search engine results *from day one*. These sites get inbound links because they are prominent; they don't become prominent because they have inbound links. Of course it helps to have a lot of inbound links; but - whether you agree or not - the domain name and the title of the site are far more important.

[risk]

I must disagree with a lot of the contributions here.
Prior to reading this post I decided to check the stats and bandwidth usage of some of my 500+ sites and was astonished to find that a test site we were developing over two years ago England Tickets - sports, football, music concerts and events tickets was getting over 1gb of usage per month on a 20k page. The page had no content apart from header tags and a couple of lines of text yet ranks number one on MSN for the england tickets keyword yet it only has one link to it

On MSN the top generic keyword always seems to rank No1 from my experience!

The reason sexy shoes ranks highly on Google is not down to this though - Google doesn't use domain name as a major factor in its algorithm. It is purely down to the number of backlinks from relevant sites (in this case mostly blogs so this is probably a very short term ranking).

Risk

[wige]

Originally Posted by Kate Lennon

If others are being misled, it is by yourself and others here who think they know what they're talking about but really don't. Every website I've worked on or launched over an 11-year period - bar one, and I know the reasons for that - is on page 1 of Google search results for the most competitive search terms. And it has very little to do with inbound links, and everything to do with choosing the right domain name.

If the proper domain name is so important, how come when I do a search on Google to find out when Aerosmith will be appearing near me (using the search term Aerosmith concerts), except for result #7 (aerosmith.com) none of the results on the front page have the words aerosmith or concert(s) in the domain? Further, if it is such a determining factor, why does aerosmith.com appear in position 7 and not position 1?

In fact, if the keyword appearing in the domain name is so important, why does wikipedia show up so high in most searches I do? Or could they be doing well because they have a lot of inbound links from on-target pages which contain relevant text in the link and surrounding text?

[Kate Lennon]

Originally Posted by wige

If the proper domain name is so important, how come when I do a search on Google to find out when Aerosmith will be appearing near me (using the search term Aerosmith concerts), except for result #7 (aerosmith.com) none of the results on the front page have the words aerosmith or concert(s) in the domain? Further, if it is such a determining factor, why does aerosmith.com appear in position 7 and not position 1?

In fact, if the keyword appearing in the domain name is so important, why does wikipedia show up so high in most searches I do? Or could they be doing well because they have a lot of inbound links from on-target pages which contain relevant text in the link and surrounding text?

When I search Google for "Aerosmith", the first listing - position 1, page 1 - is for aerosmith.com:

Aerosmith - Google Search

I don't know why that site is listed in 7th position when you do a search, but n any even you still prove my point. Seventh position on the first page wouldn't be too shabby, would it? I never claimed that having a generic or specific keyword domain name would guarantee #1 search engine placement. What I said was that it usually guarantees a position on page 1 or 2 of Google search results (usually page 1). I don't dispute that various other SEO factors also come into play to determine precisely where a site will appear in search results for a given search term.

A search for "Aerosmith concerts" also displays aerosmith.com on the upper half of page 1.

The reason the website "aerosmithconcerts.com" doesn't appear on the first page of search results is because there is no such website (it is a frame page carrying sponsored ads).

Again, the domain name rules.