Robert_Charlton - 5:36 am on Dec 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

I've been seeing this since April 2007 and haven't seen it change since then.

Regarding martinibuster's observation in April, I didn't see such an effect then and posted to that effect, also saying...

I've always felt that the perceived ranking boost from a domain name comes in fact from the company name... or whatever ends up in anchor text of inbound links. I don't think I've seen anything to suggest that Google parses the individual words....

In the past few weeks, though, I've had a test site, which, like mb's, was never intended to be promoted, but has move up to the top on a fairly competitive phrase. Its content is more or less garbage, and, beyond its first seed link, I've assumed it's ranked purely because of scrapers.

I'm still not completely convinced that it's ranking just because of the domain name... as the company name is the same as the domain with spaces... but the thought that Google has turned up the domain name dial has definitely crossed my mind.