I was curious about the PR quality a domain name might have. Consider an example: I want to make a traveller’s guide website for <a city>. So, amongst my 1000s of choices I find that 'cityguide' dot com is available. But at the same time, 'cityabbreviationguide' dot com is also available (using initials) so I am in a dilemma. I would have personally preferred cityabbreviationguide as it is shorter and makes perfect sense to go for a shorter name. Am I wrong? Should I had rather go for cityguide as using the full word makes a better keyword matching in Google? Over the years I have seen some really ridiculous names used by low quality affiliated-link based websites (sometimes over 30 characters!) such as cheap-cars4u-american-bargains-deals dot com (well you get the idea). Does that really work? I have noticed that after performing a search in Google, apart from the description for each website, any domain names matching the search keywords are also been highlighted. In terms of SEO would Google preferred to see the cityguide or cityabbreviationguide – is there serious difference? Please tell me for which would you go for (this is just an example I used here).
Best Regards.
[edited by: Webwork at 12:53 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2006]
[edit reason] Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
First of all thank you for the quick responses.
@truezeta - No, these are not the real names but the ones I was looking for were very similar.
For some reason I think I knew the suggestion will be to get both. But what if I had to choose *only* one of the two - which one should have been? But if I was to get both, do you mean that I should place the website on the short name and also have a redirect from the long->short? Also, is there any way to check for any blacklisting in regard with a given domain name? I know the archive dot org looks in the past, but it only gives you a cached snapshot of a previous website (and not always!). I am not sure if websites can be blacklisted on domain name, IP address or something else?
Regards.
