Keywords & Domain Names
TweetMost likely if you try to buy a domain name for a specific keyword that you are after you will find that it is already taken. One of the biggest reasons these domains are so popular is having keywords in your site's domain name allows you to easily get the desired anchor text that you wanted to rank for. Over the years the search engines have tried to fight the abuse of keyword anchor text by making it less of a factor in the rankings, but in my personal experience it still carries a lot of weight.
Say for example your site is CNN.com. You would get a lot of links to your site with the anchor text of:
- CNN
- cnn
- cnn.com
- CNN News
- Breaking News at CNN
If instead the domain was News.com you would get a lot of links containing the anchor text "news". If "news" was the anchor text that news sites want to rank for (and why wouldn't it be) you would think News.com would have a leg up on CNN.com. Not only would it get more links with the proper anchor text, but Google isn't going to filter those anchor text links because of the keyword being in the domain name. Distinguishing between what domains are focused on keywords and which are brands is difficult to compute and I would think Google would want to error on the side of caution.
Now that isn't going to say that if your keyword is in the domain name you are automatically going to be sent to the top of the search engines. You still need to build a healthy profile of links from authority sites. It appears to me in the last couple of years Google has decreased the importance of keywords in the domain so that lower quality sites do not outrank authority sites. With so many more extensions being available rather than .com and .net, it's easier than ever for marketers to try and game the system and purchase keyword domains with odd extensions, further diluting the effectiveness of having keywords in the domain name.
Do not try to create hundreds of different sites based around similar keywords. For example, do not buy redwidgets.com, bluewidgets.com, and down the line. Instead buy widgets.com and build your navigation around different variations.
Check out this survey data composed by SEOMoz.org to see the importance of keywords in domain and subdomain names.
June 13th, 2011 - 04:25
This is certainly a outstanding write-up. Thanks a lot for taking the time to detail all this out for folks. It is a great help!