Small Change in Domain Name

How much does it matter, having an s or no s per say.

[thaedge]

I have a niche of blue widgets I am after, however bluewidgets.com is taken, as well as blue-widgets.com. I could simply look for the .net if available, but in my case they as well are not.

This leaves me with a problem and my question. How much of a difference does blue-widget.com differ from blue-widgets.com or bluewidgets.com from bluewidget.com?

Note since I know it will come up: people most likely will search on "blue widgets" most of the time

If my keywords are all for blue widgets but my site is bluewidget will that help or hurt me? Curious what people have seen/done in the past.

*fire away*

Thanks - Edge

[trillianjedi]

I believe that domain name importance is all in the anchor text, so:-

blue-widgets.com

is the best domain for blue widgets because both keywords ("blue" and "widget") will be clocked by googlebot as seperate keywords in the link text. It's better than bluewidgets.com for that reason.

I have found that adding a third word after your keywords works really well. Can you consider something like:-

blue-widgets-online.com

Or is having a short domain name important to you?

For information on anchor text and inbound links have a search through these forums.

TJ

[thaedge]

Actually, I agree with what ive read and seen on blue-widgets.com.

What Im curious about is if the (s) or ending to a word matters that much.

For example:

fish or fishing?
widget or widgets?
fast or faster?

So if someone does a search on fast, which domain is best (or are they equal): fast-widget.com or faster-widget.com?

[Mohamed_E]

Google [google.com] does not do stemming:

Word Variations (Stemming)

To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. In other words, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter in the search box. Searching for "googl" or "googl*" will not yield "googler" or "googlin". If in doubt, try both forms: "airline" and "airlines," for instance.

So a search for "fish" will not match "fishing", a search for "fast" will not match "faster" and a seacrh for "widget" will not match "widgets" (and vice versa in all cases).

[thaedge]

Thanks Mohamed_E, I think I knew that(I think), but then again a light went on in my head when you said that (go go gadget memory). Based on your answer and that of a co-worker on here I think I have my answer.

And that is that so long as I SEO my site for blue widget, having the domain be blue-widgets.com and not the blue-widget.com that I want wont hurt me much in the long run.

Thanks all.

- edge