Here’s the scenario, I have two domains, xyz.com and exact-keyword.net…
- xyz.com has been registered since 2004 and exact-keyword.net is only a few months old.
- exact-keyword is a small site (a handful of pages) all centred around the keyword
- xyz.com is a ‘blog and I made one post with the url http://xyz.com/exact-keyword/
- All other aspects are fairly similar, eg. meta tags, title, keyword density, etc,.
- Both sites have no link backs
- 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
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[…] temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has […]
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