How far does the domain name affect search engine ranking ranking?

[vik_c]

I was wondering, how far does a domain name affect Google's ranking?

I've noticed if you have a single word domain, the in most cases your site ranks in the top ten for that word in Google but this doesn't seem to be always the case especially if your domain is not a .com, .net or .org domain. The country specific domains seem to be ignored altogether. Also domains which have two hyphens between two single words don't get index most often.

How much weigtage does the domain name have in Google ranking.

What do the experts here think?

Thank you,

Vikram

[JuDDer]

I never used to think it was important.
Recently however, I setup a new site on a domain like 'keyword1-keyword2.com'.

It only has PR2, but is ranked #3 in Google for it's target search term. All the sites around this listing are all PR5 or 6, so it seems to be more important than I first thought.

[heini]

Hi vik_c welcome to the board!

You say:
>The country specific domains seem to be ignored altogether.

Huh? If you search for English terms you are likely to find a majority of com, net, org and info. But you'll certainly also find lots of co.uk. For other languages you'll find more ccTLDs than not...

>Also domains which have two hyphens between two single words don't get index most often.

Can't concur here either.Single word doamins often are old, established domains, often owned by huge companies, those are favoured by Google's ranking per se.

[vik_c]

heini, thank you, yes, I agree on .co.uk being ranked well, they're next after the three TLDs. but I refer to the little known extensions like .be, .nu , .tk and a zillion others, there are not too many of those indexed even when you search by domain name.

When I refer to domain names with two hyphens between two words not being indexed I mean like keyword1--keyword2 . com for example.
(notice the two dashes).

Domain names in the format Judder mentions, seem to have some advantage, I'm trying to assess how much really. Thanks Judder.

[bateman_ap]

I would say the ranking increase is due to the way people link back to you, for example, if you have the domain www.blue-widgets.com and your rival has www.comapnyname.com most of the time if someone links back to the sites they will use the domain name. So blue-widgets get a ranking benefit as they are using their keywords in the link back while companyname doesn't.

I personally think it is the only flaw in googles calculations.

[heini]

As to the ccTLDs from smaller (online-)countries: they are not ignored or ranked worse by Google or other major SEs. It's just there are less of those...

There's a statistic on sites/languages for Fast, which might interest you:
[webmasterworld.com...]

It certainly would be interesting to compare the distribution of ccTLDS indexed by Google or Fast with the counts for existing sites under those domains.