Here’s the scenario, I have two domains, xyz.com and exact-keyword.net…

1. xyz.com has been registered since 2004 and exact-keyword.net is only a few months old.
2. exact-keyword is a small site (a handful of pages) all centred around the keyword
3. xyz.com is a ‘blog and I made one post with the url http://xyz.com/exact-keyword/
4. All other aspects are fairly similar, eg. meta tags, title, keyword density, etc,.
5. Both sites have no link backs
6. Both sites have been indexed by google

In this situation, xyz.com is ranked #11 in google for “exact keyword” whilst exact-keyword.com is ranked 45. What this tells me is that google has severely dropped the significance of the keyword in the domain name and is looking firstly at the age, and then the keyword in the path after the domain name. I thought this was strange but here’s a clearer example that I can show you. If you google for “domainholics”, you will notice that the first entry is my domainholics.com site is #1 but it’s not the root domain listed, it’s actually my inner dot com auctions page - http://www.domainholics.com/dot-com-auctions/. Now do another search on a highly competitive keyword “loans“. You will see that the top entry is http://www.moneyexpert.com/Compare-Loans.aspx … ie. no keyword in the domain name at all.

How bout that… maybe I don’t need to be registering 1000 domains and all I need is a really old domain with 1000 pages :) I’ve got my eye on officialdealers.com which is 9 years old and is being auctioned on eBay with me as top bidder @ $1.74

Popularity: 5%

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the must have tools in a link builder’s toolchest. I visit it monthly to

1. check on the backlinks that Google has crawled for my sites,



2. check what keywords are searching for to reach my sites
   
   You can see I’m ranking quite highly on keywords like “lana krost” and “livinia nixon” - it’s probably about time I did some deep linking to maximise these other keywords :)
3. check that my sitemap.xml is correctly formatted
4. Increase the crawl rate to my sites.
   
   Obviously, the more frequently the crawl, the quicker you’ll come up on search keywords for new terms. However, Google normally only lets you set normal, or slow, unless your site is quite established and frequently being updated.

Popularity: 5%