Keyword Domain Names

[Sweet Tooth #3]

I haven't noticed anything with regards to keyword domains. Sometimes I think I do, but then another set of SERP's will show opposite results.

All I've noticed is that these tweaks over the past few months have really shuffled stuff around. And I can't find any rhyme or reason to it. So I stopped trying, it was driving me nuts.

[deepsand]

If they change, then their is something not right.

There's no reason to expect that anything will remain static forever.

[watto]

It's not that I expect themt to remain static forever, it is simply the fact that I am seeing something out of the norm.....for me. Ok, here is an example of what I am talking about. My rankings are below:

businesses for sale - #1
business sale - #1
business sales - #1
business for sale - I was #1 until a few days ago and I am now #2. 'business for sale . com . au' has now bumped back up to the #1 spot. All of my research indicates to me that they don't deserve to be there (in my opinion). Hence the reason I have a feeling something was tweeked over the weekend to give a little more weight to keyword domains and I wanted to know if anyone seen similar results.

[deepsand]

With over 200 variables in the SERP algorithm, any short term fluctuations in a few observations of a few particular query string results are meaningless.

[Sweet Tooth #3]

It's not that I expect themt to remain static forever, it is simply the fact that I am seeing something out of the norm.....for me. Ok, here is an example of what I am talking about. My rankings are below:

businesses for sale - #1
business sale - #1
business sales - #1
business for sale - I was #1 until a few days ago and I am now #2. 'business for sale . com . au' has now bumped back up to the #1 spot. All of my research indicates to me that they don't deserve to be there (in my opinion). Hence the reason I have a feeling something was tweeked over the weekend to give a little more weight to keyword domains and I wanted to know if anyone seen similar results.

All of my homepages target keyphrases that are an exact match to my domains. These sites also have dozens of blog posts that compete against exact match domains from my competitors. I haven't seen seen any changes with regard to keyword domains. In fact, I haven't seen anything to suggest that keyword domains have any noticeable benefit at all.

You said you only lost 1 spot, maybe your competitor just built some links. Sounds like you're doing ok though.

[watto]

I am happy to say that the rankings have gone back to 'normal'. I understand that there really is no such thing as normal, but it was something out of the ordinary for me.

[morestar]

If I'm right in interpreting what you're saying watto, I can, with a grain of salt, assume that keyword rich domain names still do help, to some degree...not it's only in this situation but if you search telephone seo or tele seo my site is bubbling around the top spots and I just registered the domain in February and launched the site two weeks ago.

But as deepsand is saying:

Each and every set of results is in some way differentiated from other results based on, at the least, IP Address, User Location setting, Data Center servicing the query, TLD servicing the query, User Agent, and User Activity History.

What are you seeing on your end if you search the keywords I mentioned above?

[swampdeer]

I think it varies depending on the niche, but my anecdotal experience suggests that in some industries, having the keywords in the domain allows the website to buy huge amounts of spammy links without being penalised by Google.

This seems to have hit some sites hard after Panda 2.3 back around late summer 2011 and again early this year. I only look after about 15 websites but I've seen it happen in industries where gaining good natural inbound links is especially difficult because the subject matter is uninteresting.