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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?
What you need to do is try to get these authoritative sites to list your site as something like "Widgets at Mybrandname" or "Mybrandname Widgets Inc." or whatever. Then when you get as famous as pepsi, drop the keywords from your official business name and stick with only "Mybrandname".
Anotherwords, in the meantime, you need to help Google out and let it know your company as a site for widgets by getting that to be in the link text and surrounding text for any link you may get to your site.
[edited by: born2drv at 6:55 am (utc) on Mar. 9, 2003]
Google will do as they please, although generally, you can count on them to improve over time.
keyword-in-domain is not the most important factor in good results. For some very good hints at what You can do to improve your situation, see this thread [webmasterworld.com].
HTH,
Jim
Something has to be done to get rid of affiliate one page spam sites. Every site that comes up in a search I do is just the same crap, a page full of banners and affiliate links. I imagine most of these sites owners post here so im sure nobody will agree with me.
give it time and Google will normalise any added ranking effect of these-keyword-hyphenated-sites for queries equaling these keywords in the url.
Either that or complaints will overflood them.
Most industries, if the top results are being held by very low quality sites, then it's easy to break into the top.
Might take few months, but quality wins over time with Google.
In the mean time, those are some other great suggestions to start you off with.
I wouldn't want to get tossed out with the garbage when it's time to clean up. I'd stick to your brand. It may have more long term value.
thats a description I'd like to send some of those...
by the way: do a google on allinurl: cheap
my advice would be to first start an affiliate program, I've made more from affiliates than all the search engines combined.
If you're serious, hire someone to handle seo and focus on building links, and recruiting top affiliates.
Everyones quick to complain about affiliate sites being in google, but "provided" they aren't doing anything spam related they have every right to be listed ... they make google a LOT of money via the adwords
nobody has a "right" to be listed in Google.
its best to talk of "users" rights.
Fact is if users keep on getting affiliate sites with no value added bugging up their search results they will go elsewhere for a search engine.
Im all for affiliate sites who do something different and give you a lot of unqiue content for the user - not just for the spiders. The professional ones are good, but the 99% of backyard/attic sites just built for SE hits are giving all affiliates a bad name. Sooner or later the bad ones may influence Google to introduce filters that may catch the good ones by mistake. Nobody wants that.
I am from an industry where most webmasters wake up with "keyword domains" on their minds.
In my opinion the industry is in the top 3 for most difficult to crack in the serps, especially for the 1 keyword search.
Just worked really hard at it, spent hours and hours reading Webmasterworld, talked to the professionals out there, and did what I was told.
"Bang"
cracked it within 3 months on page 1, ahead of keyword domains, guys with 27,000 backlinks, and all other tricksters.
this is with a Brand.co.uk domain, NOT keyword-keyword.com
as others have mentioned, hard work pays off, it certainly did for us.
Shak
I run many of these crappy looking affiliate sites with key-word domains and I run many business sites with branded sounded names. And it is successful because so many people with web pages don't know how to use the search engines to gain better placement. They are generally thrilled they show up when searching for domain.com rather than keywords. :) If your searching for keywords and you see keyword-keyword-domains.com then someone out there knows search engine placement and is using it for what it's worth :P
I assume someday that keyword urls will be cut down to size, but till then they are the #1 most important *easy* thing a person can do to rank well in results.
In general I agree with alot of what you say, however, you assume all searchers want loads of content ...
If I do a search [casinos] ... I probably just want to see a quick recommendation about casinos and then pick one ...
As opposed to seeing a "content" site that has hundreds of pages giving me the entire history of casinos, every newsletter that they've ever written etc, etc ...
I bet your affiliate friends would drop.
Nice to know somebody agrees with some things i say!
This is a *very* good point. He says that these SERPs are being dominated by kids with spam affiliate sites. He says he is going to spend 400K this year developing brand identification. If he's got that kind of money to develop this site, then he sure as heck could afford a decent SEO. And things like buy links on high PR pages with just the right anchor text. While hyphenated domain names have an edge with Google, this can easily be overcome with spending some money on SEO.
I disagree. Remember, what Google wants to deliver to people are *relevant* SERPs. It the domain name is blue-widgets.com, then almost certainly what the webmaster has on that site is blue widgets for sale.
Period. End of story. Every time you see 'keyword-keyword-more-keyword-spam-here' it's NOT the domain name that does it.
How many times are we going to go round and round with this? It's the LINK text people.
Link text - not domain. Sure, when you have keyword-keyword-etc.com, people might *only* link with that keyword...but, you can get links with your keyword just as easily, as Shak said, with "Brand.com" instead.
What Google publication or story has supported this whole nonsense about 'keyword-hyphen-spam' works better, anyway?
It just confuses the real issue.
I declare hyphenated domains offically dead. ;)
one is OK though!
<---- only about this, though ;)
I think keywords in domains should have no value at all unless the word searched is trademarked which should bring up the properties of the trademark owner.
I understand that the key benefit of keyword domains is that when linked to the anchor text includes the keyword. If you ask someone to link to you with keywords and not your domain they consider that spam lol.
Not at all. A knowledgeable, ethical SEO can find lots of ways to fine-tune your existing web presence and boost your rankings without doing one single thing that's dodgy.
If you haven't had input from a professional SEO (and taken corresponding action), I'd be willing to bet that you're nowhere near maxing out the "good-guy" things you could do to compete in the search engines.
This says to me you dont know what seo is, and that if you took the time to understand what seo is you might be able to garner much better results.
The difference between having a title to your page that says "my website" and a title that includes keywords that have been found to be highly searched can do wonders in a vertical with poor competition. An seo will tell you that, and its certainly not spam.
theres a bunch of other things you can do to make sure your page is relevant to specific searches as well, none of which will set off any moral radar.
so stop whining and do something about it.
>Spam & SEO.
Finally came to the realization the other day that the two had one, and only one differece:
Spam = short term success at any cost.
SEO = long term success at any cost.
Given a choice between the 2, I know which way I would lean if I were you...but hey, sometimes, it's best to take advantage of both worlds - to see what works best for you in the current market.
That's just pure nonsense. Sites with few incoming links can rank highly based on their url alone. It's pure poppycock to ignore the fact that a site with 300 inbound links titled "keyword" will usually rank lower than a site with 50 similar "keyword" links with a URL of "keyword.com".
This is a dead horse. Keyword in domain is more important than any other element there is.
