[Video] SEO & Domaining: Domain Names & Search Engine Marketing

How Domain Names Play a Role in SEO & SEM

Published: October 27, 2007 by Aaron Wall in videos domain names

Comments

zwah
October 28, 2007 - 2:47am

Love the video blog! And, as mostly a domainer, it's great to see SEO and domains working so well together, albeit by the graces of Google. My goal: to get sitelinks for my parked generic domains... I know I'll have to unpark them and put up content (!), but a worthy experiment.

I didn't know how far you could literally push the competition off the page... powerful!

October 28, 2007 - 4:28am

To get sitelinks and keep them longterm I suspect it will require a good bit of work. As more people look into getting sitelinks they may get harder to get, especially for high value keywords that are not brand specific.

DeletedLIVE
October 28, 2007 - 5:38pm

Thanks for the video! Well be posting this vid to our blog!

I have to laugh whenever I hear an 'SEO expert' say that keywords in your domain has no affect on SEO. LOL!

I have always believed what you have confirmed here.

Please let me know what you think of this new free tool we just launched for finding high PageRank expiring domain names by keyword - www.deletedlive.com - has domain age+, WayBack data, backorder ability and more. We're adding more tools each week. (sorry for the plug, thought this might be helpful and relevant)

You'll see by our banners we're firm believers in your message, Aaron. ;) Thanks again.

October 28, 2007 - 10:42pm

Hi Buddy
I would recommend the following features

  • sort by any field...ie: let me search for high PageRank domains without even insterting any words at all.
  • sort by a combination of features: like at least 3 years old with a minimum PageRank of 4
  • allow people to search for any combination of TLDs (while filtering the ones they do not want)
  • add dmoz listings and yahoo directory listings as search criteria
  • create a list of top expiring domains like DomainTools offers here
DeletedLIVE
October 28, 2007 - 11:18pm

These are great recommendations Aaron, thanks.

Your first suggestion is already possible - no fields are required for any search. We are currently working on adding the dmoz and yahoo info, along with actually displaying age and G & Y backlinks - this should help to filter the faked PR domains.

The 'Top Domains' list is a sweet idea - adding that to the cue. ;) Thanks again for checking it out.

MLaritz
October 28, 2007 - 8:39pm

I am loving all the videos. I currently have gone through about half of them.

What are you using to create them? Is it like a screen capture, or just a video camera pointed at your monitor? I just thought of a few places I could use something like to help people change code.

Let me know, Thanks!

October 28, 2007 - 10:34pm

These are made with Camtasia.

MLaritz
October 30, 2007 - 1:10pm

So I just bought the domain dscsfs.com. The site is going to be about Deals, Coupons, Freebies (dscsfs).

Would it be better if I used DealsCouponsFreebies.com so that I would rank better for some or all of those keywords? I was going to buy the longer version, but I thought it might be too long. Now that I have dscsfs, it is kind of a hassle to type in.

What do you think?

October 30, 2007 - 4:40pm

I am not sure that I like either of those URLs, but I would probably opt to make the longer of the two my branded URL unless I thought I might want to change the acronym down the road.

If you feel comfortable and convinced of the value of the names though I would keep both registered and 301 redirect the shorter version to the longer version.

zyhit001
October 31, 2007 - 5:34am

Yes, your are quite right.
But, What if I bought a domain that with a old age but never used in the internet?
Does it make difference?

October 31, 2007 - 9:26am

If the domain has no links and was never indexed then it's born on date does not matter as much. If, however, the domain has been in the index for a long time with even just a few links I think a decent amount of trust is given.

dan.thies
December 23, 2007 - 5:40pm

So, Aaron... now I'm curious.

Do you believe that the domain name itself is a ranking factor, and that the words are somehow fished out of it, like Michael Campbell?

Or is this just about secondary effects (if your domain is purplewidgets.com people will link with Purple Widgets in the link)?

December 23, 2007 - 11:24pm

Hi Dan
The domain name is a factor. It was not something that was as overt a few years back, but as Google has placed more emphasis on site authority and got more aggressive at filtering out unnatural link profiles (with too much focused anchor text), they have used domain names as a signal of quality to be able to mix in some smaller domains for brand specific queries and the like.

The domain name boost does not count for my-spammy-name.biz, but if you have no hyphens it counts. You get a lot of algorithmic reward for exact match one word, decent reward for two, and a bit less for three.

Here is a post about a domain that had 0 links and ranking in the top 10 above many authoritative sites, based on the domain name. The screenshots on that page unfortunately show me logged into a Google account, but the same rankings held true when I was not logged in.

And I think you and I have both done a good job marketing our SEO books. Why in the world would sites like SeoBook.name rank for Seo Book unless the domain name counts. I know they probably got some decent anchor text, but how many quality links can a site like that get?

You can probably discount some of these examples but I can give you a couple more examples via phone or email (though they would not be for public consumption of course).

talz11
December 25, 2007 - 6:27pm

this video isnt working :(

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