Does Having Your Keyword In Your Domain
Rank Higher?
This is one of the controversial questions
in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
forums, yet it is very easy to answer for
any particular search engine. This article
conclusively answers that question for the
leading search engine.
The methodology is really quite simple for
this question. I gathered the results of the
queries I naturally performed last month using
the leading search engine and analyzed them.
It was a simple matter of counting the number
of listings that had the keyword in the domain
vs. those that didn't. This data was tabulated
against the ranking for the first 8 search
engine listings.
Here is the graph: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/clg01.jpg
(Note to webmasters: You have permission to
hot-link to the graph, text link to it, or
even copy it to your own site)
The X-axis shows the ranking from 1 through
8 on the leading search engine. The Y-axis
shows the number of domains that contained
the keyword. There is an obvious correlation,
which shows that domains
containing the keyword are more likely to
be ranked in the higher positions than domains
that do not contain the keyword.
Notes:
1. For the purposes of this test, only the
domain portion of the URL was studied. So,
the following would have been the results
for the following URLs for the keyword "widgets":
http://www.widgets.com/widgets (yes - domain
contained the keyword "widgets"
http://www.abcwidgets.com/abcd (yes - domain
contained the keyword widgets)
http://widgets.abc.com/ (yes ~ domain contained
the keyword widgets)
http://www.abc.com/widgets/ (no ~ although
the URL contained the keyword widgets, the
domain did not!)
Basically, the domain was considered to
be any portion of the URL after the http://,
but before the first slash which would start
the rest of the URL.
2. Over 1,000 queries were examined for this
test.
3. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate
different keywords. I merely took a random
sampling of the queries I performed during
the month.
Conclusion:
When looking at the first 8 positions, the
leading search engine ranks domains containing
the keyword (search phrase) higher than domains
that do not contain the keyword. This is merely
a correlation study, so it cannot be determined
from this study whether the leading search
engine purposefully entertains this factor
or not. The actual factors used may be far
distant from the factor we studied, but the
end result is that this search engine does,
in fact, rank domains containing the keyword
higher.
by Jon Ricerca http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers
and authors of the Search Engine Ranking
Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other SERF reports, please
visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Learn more about finding the right keywords
Researching
keywords
Keywords
and keyphrases
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