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bluewidgetsblue widgetsblue widgets
Note that if they search for blue widgets (note tha space) then you dont get the same boost
I can't agree with that - it is pretty easy to prove.
A Google search for "Yahoo Search" (a non-commercial term to comply with the site's TOS) show the following with the terms in bold face.
search.yahoo.com
ysearchblog.com
Yahoo searches also bold face keyword search terms in the URL.
The simple fact that they are bold facing partial matches in the URL shows that they can parse individual terms out of the URLs.
The simple fact that they are bold facing partial matches in the URL shows that they can parse individual terms out of the URLs.
Noooooooo, just because they show partial word matches in bold does not necesserily mean they actually matched those partial words -- this is because cost of doing quick regular expression to make those bits look bold in end result is low, where as costs of actually splitting those bits off during HTML pre-processing are much higher.
I am not saying here they don't do it (Yahoo is big enough for that), but mere fact of partial bits bolded is not good enough to signify its done at pre-processing stage.
Yes the keywords in your URL have a positive affect on the SERPS. Choose your domain name wisely...not too long either!
could have such a high page rank on certain terms.
And I agree with everyone here that KWs in your url do help in the SERPS. From what I can tell (and this is from observation, not testing) it matters most in Yahoo. MSN next, and Google last. Actually, with Google it seems like the weight shifts with every update. So yes, it's important to use descriptive keywords when you name your pages and directories.
Is it the end-all? no
Just search for books in Google - amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com top ranked - not because they have books in the URL - but because there are a jillion and three links to them that include the word "books" in the anchor text.
Does this mean that books.com is a valueless domain name? Of course not.
Anchor text trumps keywords in URL - but that doesn't make KWs in the URL unimportant.
Finally, I think that if I had the choice between example.com and widgetstore.com I'd choose the latter because I think, visually having your URL in bold in the SERP is an advantage - that it promotes confidence in the searcher that widgets will be found there.
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PR = PageRank = green point thingy that appears if you have the Google Toolbar installed - keywords in URL - no effect on it.
Rank in the search engines (ie the SERPs) - yes KW in URL is part of the overall ranking calculation.
Noooooooo, just because they show partial word matches in bold does not necesserily mean they actually matched those partial words...
That is an opinion.
I have seen a blog page rank higher for "super widgets" than a site whose product is "super widgets." This blog page was about animals, had nothing at all to do with "super widgets." The only reason this page ranked so well was because it had the words "super-widgets" in it's url for that page, i.e. "blog.com/super-widgets.html" and subsequently had lots of inbound links from outside linking to it with those words in the anchor text.
As far as processing those words in the domain name, I purchased many domains with the keywords in the DOMAIN name (different than keyword in the url) and have seen these domains rank for their name rather quickly, leaping over more established domains.
In my experience, the keyword in the domain name, and in the url, help rank a page better. BUT, I don't do it beyond two keywords.
That is an opinion.
More of an educated guess based on experience. Consider that major search engines require exact keyword matching in search queries as pattern matching or wildcards are not acceptable due to much higher resource requirements.
The text that we see is done by a fairly quick piece of code that pulls data and since its cheap to run regular expressions there its cheap to just put <b></b> tags around any pattern matched keyword in it. This is what can often highlight bits that were not actually matched.
Google appears to be able to identify separate words even when they are not delimited, ie "bluewidgets" can be understood as "blue widgets", which is great, but again due to the most likely way the highlighting code works it is entirely possible to have partial bits highlighted even though actual search did not take them into account, ie: take our "bluewidgets.com" domain found and highlighted when searched for "blue widgets", this could have happened simply because blue widgets were also found in it, yet highlighter can just use reg exps where as search is unlikely to use them.
E.g. if your domain is "discountwidgets.com" then some link partners will have "discount widgets" as the link text for your site (or in the surrounding text/description).
The interesting thing is that if another site tries to compete by encouraging link partners to use the phrase "keyword1 keyword2" in their reciprocal links then it could be detected as spam (whereas for your site it probably wont).
