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Do you guys think that in the future google will return the best sites for particular keyword searches or just the best optimized sites to rank well? Should I dump my brand and go garbage?
After reading that, it's pretty clear, the last thing Google's founders would have done was code in a 'bonus' for keyword.com :)
I am not an SEO, and I am only a mediochre webmaster. But I think you are really missing out if you dismiss everything that SEOs do as being spam.
Many of the SEO suggestions that I have picked up here have actually made my site BETTER for my users!
Quite often good navigation for the bot and the users is the same. Good Titles are good for the bots and good for the users. Limiting the bells and whistles to those few places necessary is good for both. Care taken in the copy will pay off for both.
And there is nothing wrong with paying someone to keep track of the links coming in to your site.
If you want an ethical SEO, it is really up to you to get one. If you hang a "get number one or you're fired, I don't care how you do it" on them, you will get a spammer. If you suggest the areas that you believe you could use some help, link structure, keywords, etc, then you will end up with a better website.
It's not hard to examine results and the linking associated with them. It's plain as day when all sites are linked with the same keyword and the domain-keyword one can win with far fewer links.
One interesting thing I just noticed is a site that rocketed to #1 on the strength of doorway pages and guestbook entries did so with apparently *none* of the links being that two word keyword! However, each of the *doorway* pages where the links originate are titled that two word keyword!
In other words... for a search on blue widgets, the link text is "john smith" but the links originate from a dozen pages titled "blue widgets".
And as steveb said, that is ancient history. The problem is that Google isn't going to tell what is in the secret sauce. Unless someone wants to do some careful experiments, we really don't know what the answer is. However, a keyword being in the domain name does tend to be highly correlated with the site being relevant to that. Thus it seems like a reasonable factor to add in the algo. The other practical problem is that even if it is all anchor text, if you are brand.com then it stands to reason some sites that link to you will do so with your brand name. Does everyone who links to microsoft.com use the anchor text "computer software"? Sure, if by some miracle you can control the anchor text that every site that links to you uses, brand.com may be as good as keyword1-keyword2.com. However, this isn't the way it tends to work in the real world.
Dude, I manage more than 50 sites. I consult on hundreds more, routinely.
Do let me know the # of sites to study before I get to the 'real world' sounds more like an MTV show that search engine optimization. :)
Do you have the same opinion there?
Well, there sure seems no shortage of people whose observation is that keyword in the domain name tends to do well on Google.
Correlation is not causality.
In real competitive areas the kw-rich-domains do not tend to survive high rankings.
It is in mildly competitive areas where one DMOZ PR6 listing and a few other directories with the url name as anchortext makes for outranking Joebrand.com.
Do not forget that those kw-rich domains only might rank higher for those keywords, the other 100 keyphrases important to that business, face the same natural competition as Joe-brand.com (and that is why many of the short-term kw-rich domain webmasters tend to register these other keywords as urls as well - all possibly leading to easy farming/linking/duplicate anti-spam targetting).
Search [Online Widgets] Top 20 results gotta to get to 17 before you see a listing without the keyword in the url ... not saying it isn't anchor text ...
<list of domains smipped>
[edited by: Woz at 7:36 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] no specifics please. [/edit]
[edited by: Woz at 7:37 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] no specifics please [/edit]
I agree there are certain sectors that just atract certain webmasters..
(my earlier posted example allinurl: cheap)
Would a search for "widget" be more competitive though?
If you take gambling, pharmaceutical and the likes aside, and then look at searches with 2 million plus results (competitive in the sense of number of results), the key-word-rich tend to fade away.
[edited by: Woz at 7:38 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edited by: ciml at 11:48 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please. [/edit]
Clearly a mistaken idea since page title is indisputably critical, and a far more blatantly obvious thing to manipulate than domain name.
It's impossible to imagine that there is not a presumption that a page is likely to be relevant to a topic if its url and/or title is the search term. The only question is if it matters a tiny bit or a lot.
..page title is indisputably critical..
I agree, most critical.
In my opinion, in a more ideal world, the anchortext would in many cases equal the title of the to be linked to page, as that most probably summarises the page's content.
In practice people often just copy and paste the url and do not always surround the anchortext with descriptive text.
So Joebrand.com with "Joebrand the blue widget specialist" as title , looses out against blue-widget-specialist.com.
Both could have all the normal/legitimate reasons to name their url as they did.
The only question is if it matters a tiny bit or a lot.
It matters in some search queries, for the reasons mentioned above.
Luckily once dominos is known for pizza things equal out.
Right. Why give a boost for keyword in title, but not keyword in URL?
