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let me first say i have been reading this forum for many months and i have found it to be always informative and entertaining. i would like to voice my opinion on the ranking algo in the hope someone at google might notice and take action ;)
i have a well branded successful store (eg. amazon.com instead of books.com). in fact, google employees regularly shop and use the free community area of my website. i have been frustrated in my seo improvements by a single feature of the google ranking algorithm ... that domains which include a keyword seem to be overly favored in the serps.
for example and without loss of generality, most of the top 20 positions for a given keyword i want exposure on have the following form. all in-page factors being mostly equal, one needs a high PR7 or PR8 branded site to rank among PR4 and PR5 pages.
keyword.nu
keyworddomain.com
keywordaddict.com
keyword.org
<excellent site>
keyword.net
keyword-formation.com
keyword.cz
<completely irrelevant site, probably spam>
israkeyword.com
keyword.ch
global-keyword.co.uk
<somewhat relevant blogger site>
keyword.<somesite>.nl
<spam>
n-keyword.co.uk
<excellent competing store>
hard-keyword.com
<parked domain>
i have gone from #898, #401, #345, #288, #171 and now #75 with a great deal of effort over the past six months. the process was actually quite beneficial as seo improvements to my html and site structure have greatly improved quality for users ... leaner pages, bookmarkable pages, my highest link in a given serp go the most relevant page on my website for that keyword and many other side effects not originally intended by simply trying to have a page rank higher in the serps.
i can see this issue also affecting other serps as spamming several positions for given keywords would be quite easy with domains like:
keyword1-keyword2.com
keyword1.org
keyword2.net
keyword2-keyword1.co.uk
keyword1store.com
...
i have seen these kinds of patterns before for some serps and most of the results pointed more or less to the same company or group of associates but i can't remember what they were.
i understand that if user searches for a company name, the company website they are seeking should come first or at least very high in the serps. i can see why so much weight is given to keyword in domain names for this purpose. however this causes many other serps to bury too deep highly relevant sites that users would be happy to discover.
your 0.02 please ...
This topic has already been discussed at length - a search should bring it up for you.
I believe the conclusion was that having a keyword in the domain means that you will always get anchor-text inbound links. It can't be avoided. And an anchor-text inbound link has a high intrinsic value to google for obvious reasons of context and relevance.
Why not buy www.keyword-[anything].com and 301 redirect the old one? Get your current links (the friendly ones) to update to your new link and promote the new one in future.
If you're in a very competitive market, you may need to.
TJ
I've never had a problem optimising www.keyword1keyword2.com despite the fact that neither keyword is parseable in the domain name itself. Simply the fact that the page title and anchor text is "keyword1 keyword2" is sufficient.
I think that the importance of the domain name itself in the ranking is small relative to anchor and title text. My best domain ranks number 1 for the search "keyword1 keyword2" but number 3 for the search "keyword1keyword2" despite the fact that its domain name is www.keyword1keyword2.com .
Say for your company "The Widget Co" you use the domain name www.twc.com, I believe you will reap much the same benefit if you consistently refer to the business by "The Widget Co" and have your incoming links do the same.
This topic has already been discussed at length - a search should bring it up for you. I believe the conclusion was that having a keyword in the domain means that you will always get anchor-text inbound links. It can't be avoided. And an anchor-text inbound link has a high intrinsic value to google for obvious reasons of context and relevance.
you make a very good point here and i apologize for not doing the proper research before posting.
Why not buy www.keyword-[anything].com and 301 redirect the old one? Get your current links (the friendly ones) to update to your new link and promote the new one in future.
i strongly disagree with this strategy. we carry many products and yes we are selling <keyword1>, <keyword2>, ... this year but our internet identity and customer relationships greatly trancend what people are searching for this year.
besides i don't want to end up with a bunch of sites of the form:
books-amazon.com
businessbooks-amazon.com
cds-amazon.com
patiofurniture-amazon.com
...
i consider this to be a form of spam and i wish to keep a single brand identity across all our markets that will survive over time.
