Importance of Domain Name in Search Engines
August 15, 2009 by David
Filed under Domains & Websites, Making Money, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Revenue
A keyword rich domain name is of little doubt a major importance with the search-engine ranking algorithm used by the major search engines. Most domain name and web site experts tend to downplay the value of the domain name in the URL. However, we believe it is a much more major factor than many search experts and guros realize or believe.
For example, in the Bing search results below for lemon juice you will find LemoinJuice.org ranked a very high #4 out of a significant 13,000,000 search results (even higher by ranking #3 with quotes used in the search). The LemonJuice.org web site is a nice little web site with some good relevant (but limited) content, nevertheless, the site itself is comparatively small, especially compared to many other much larger websites which rank below it.
Making its high-ranking even more impressive is the fact the three sites ranking above lemonjuice.org are extremely important and huge websites (Wikipedia and EzineArticles) with many 1000s of content pages and 1000s of links.
The fact LemonJuice.org ranks so impressively goes a long way in confirming the high value of the two keywords ‘Lemon Juice’ being in the websites URL address (view the live search results by clicking below):
Bing.com results – lemon juice without quotes: >http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemon+juice&go=&form=QBRE&qs=n target=”_blank”>
Bing.com results – “lemon juice” using quotes: >http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22lemon+juice%22&form=QBRE&qs=n target=”_blank”>
P.S. Even ranks #1 when searched without a space: > http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemonjuice&form=QBLH&qs=n” target=”_blank”>
Lemons
Having the keyword in the domain name certainly helps. But don’t get confused over why it helps. Websites that contain a keyword will get better search engine rankings because that’s how other websites refer to your website.
If you name is “David Green”, then I would expect people to refer to you: and link to you using “David Green”. The same with “big red widgets”. If your website is about “big red widgets” or you sell them then I would expect others to link to you with that phrase.
Thanks for the feedback Bill and I see what you mean that other websites refer to the site using the keywords. However, I think it’s quite interesting how LemonJuice.org ranks so high out of so many millions of G results and feel there is much more involved than just links and others referring to the keywords.
For example, without using a space (in Bing.com) it ranks #1 and outranks the likes of Wikipedia.org and EzineArticles.com in the 2, 3 and 4 positions and also ranks higher than LemonJuice.com which ranks #5. In my view, that in effect also helps confirm the fallacy about dot-com outranking other tld’s including the dot-org extension (by virtue of the site being a .com).
Yeah its really important, and one of the factors in googles algorithm. Also to add to what Bill says, one reason lemonjuice.org will help it rank for “lemon juice” is many times people make links to your site with no anchor text. In the absence of anchor text, Google takes the text out of the URL as a best-alternative replacement to anchor text. So a link just written as http://www.lemonjuice.org to Google the keywords in this are “www lemon juice org”