widgeta.co.uk versus widget.co.uk
If those domains had the same links, age, quality of content ... and so on for the other factors - how would they rank in Google and the others?
Obviously widgeta is lower but has anyone tried this?
If you do not own widget.co.uk, seesm a little pointless to buy a 'me-too' domain, rather than a strong, brandable name.
BTW, I hope you have widget.com?
Or am I missing the point?
So I wondered what was the value of adding a small word like 'a' to the end of the domain name. After all Google does not use it as a search term.
My guess is its penalized in some way but I wondered if anyone has tried it.
Common sense says that building a me-too site, with a weaker name than the original, is a pretty poor business model.
If myspace was myspace.net, and you owned the .com, then you might steal a few of their visitors; but as they own the lot, setting up myspacecool.com is unlikely to get enough visitors to justify the time taken to set up the adsense.
It's been done; the web is littered with parasite sites. But unless you do it on an industrial scale, you'd do just as well with setting up earache927.com, with two paras and three adsense blocks - unless it's already taken ;)
The<Word>
A<Word>
I assume you are neither treading on a company's trademark (PepsiA) nor trading off another company (Say, by creating a teen social site and naming it MySpacez).
If your intention is to not only mimick another company's URL but to also mimic their website and operation I'd say it's not the best of ideas.
IF all you want to know is "all else being equal" will your ability to rank be compromised by employing your approach I'd say a) experiement and report back; and, b) it's never really the case that all else is equal since the variables can include age of inbound links, age of domain, age of website, authority of inbound links which you may not be able to duplicate.
IF you are asking "will there be a penalty for a made up word" that's unlikely. Might there be a benefit to having the actual word? Possibly, since inbound link anchor text might be a bit more robust, memory of the site's URL might be better, fewer mistaken links to the real/pretender site, etc.
I'd say if you just like the made up word/domain and there are "other domain issues" (MySpaceZ) then go have fun. You will be in league with the masses.
[edited by: Webwork at 2:37 pm (utc) on Aug. 23, 2006]
Do I assume that your web site is the personal site of well-known national sites and you want to get more recognition for yours?
Is there any reason rather than using widgeta that you should not use widgettown/city/county or widgetgenreadvice, widgetgeneralinformation?
FWIW regarding awidget or widgeta, I do have a couple of generic trade words to which I prefixed with "i" to make iwidget and they perform very well.
The reason for this was that these two generic words have been trade marked for years, even though the words have completely nothing to do with their industry, therefore I need to do something to match my other trade words.
Webwork: 'Where it makes sense' a very good point. I don't desire or have a reason to steal trade marks. I am just after domain name alternatives to keyword1keyword2 say keyword1inkeyword2, keyword1andkeyword2, thekeyword1keyword2 and so on. Mind you I like myspacez but 'z' is actually used by google as a search term.
Optirex: I do not have anything in mind at present business or personal. I think I answered some of your other questions above and thank you for 'i' its another small word not searched for by Google, its interesting your sites do well with it as a prefix too.
