keyword in domain name

are forwarded domains penalized?

[world be free]

The name of both my company and domain is instockabc. abc is a generic term in my industry but not a product keyword. Because there are dozens of relevant product keywords in the industry, I didn’t want to base the company name and domain on one keyword that would be limiting. Now however, I realize there might be advantages to having a keyword in the domain.

Does anyone know if a better search engine ranking is likely, all other things being equal, by having a keyword in a domain? For instance, when searching for keyword1, will the domain keyword1_instock return a higher ranking than instockabc? The actual site content is at instockabc whereas keyword1_instock points to the content at instockabc.

In trying to think this through, I also realize that I don’t know if a forwarding domain, like keyword1_instock, is marginalized or lower in hierarchy in the search engines than the domain containing content. Can someone help clarify this?

[CygnusX1]

Hi World be free,

I found that if you have a keyword in the domain name it helps, but that is just one of many things a search engine will look at.

[world be free]

Hello CygnusX1,

Thanks for the input. I just realized that underscores are not allowed in domain names, just letters, numbers and hyphens. So, instead of using keyword1_instockabc, I would use keyword1-instockabc.