SEO Tycoon

**seolman** · 10-04-2007, 12:50 AM

I was inspired by another thread in this forum related to the importance of having a domain name with key words complimentary to your site's content.

If your web site was about an extremely popular term such as sports cars, can you imagine the fight you might have to get a reasonably short domain name related to your content?

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-sports-cars.com

It seems to me it's time for SE's to eliminate any weighting toward keywords in domains. I'm curious to see how many feel the same...

BTW - I think I fried the WMT spell-checker on the above domain name...

**ForrestCroce** · 10-04-2007, 01:03 AM

It's a useful thing for machines to look at trying to figure out what a site is about. And if they created some new extensions that would open a lot of juicy names ... although you have the same issue offline with company names.

Putting any weight on the domain name is helping to fuel the "squatting" industry, but then people would do that regardless. Didn't somebody buy McDonalds.com before Google existed?

I don't think it's a huge ranking factor. Not many people search for my name on the internet, but I still get decent search traffic.

**gringo** · 10-04-2007, 04:26 AM

If they do give more weight I think they should stop. Given that there is a limited number of 'good' domains for a particular search, giving more weight to a keyworded domain means that the people who get there first get a seo bonus. Simply getting there first doesn't mean your web site is better than someone who got there last. I doubt that a sophisticated search engine would give such an arbitrary boost, but then I've seen no evidence either way.

But then again I can see that more weight could be given to a keyworded domain if and only if all other pieces of the seo jigsaw puzzle are in place - i.e. having a keyworded domain, but lacklustre content will do you no good.

I can talk myself round in circles on this, but I don't think having a particular word in your domain means that your pages are a better match to a particular query about that word than another domain without the word.

**chrishirst** · 10-04-2007, 06:25 AM

There is only one instance where having a keyword domain actually has any appreciable weight to ranking. That is when a link is placed that uses the domain name as the anchor text. It the usual case of mixing up cause and effect.

You can see this demonstrated with this search

candsdesign

#1 is my site as you would hope

#2 & #3 is a post at WLC where the URL is the anchor text.
And it is the same all the way down the page (apart from #4 which is somebody elses site

)

And it is the same effect with keyworded folders and page names. Anchor text has always been the driving force behind Google ranking not the URL names or structure.

**CSS4Life** · 10-04-2007, 10:43 AM

I don't think search engines should stop paying attention to domain names, but of course the weight given to the domain name alone should be limited, and only be one of the small factors of the entire evaluation of a web site.

**corlock** · 10-04-2007, 11:55 AM

I answered no on the poll because IMO, most domain names are the keywords targeted of the site and its part of the SEO factors.