Panda and Keywords in Domain Demise - Too Early To Say?

[MrSavage]

I know it's early it this "new" world. Anyone been noticing keywords in domain or exact keyword domain matches changed in traffic or rankings? I still wonder if Google is in an awful state of flux. Like the earth quake, there are aftershocks and the ground doesn't stop rumbling for days or weeks.

Here is my observation. Putting keyword into quotes, as in "keywordphrase" and searching results in all, mostly all that I could see, as this "example.com/keywordphrase" etc. Not "keywordphrase.com".

Big deal? I know that when I did these tests in the past I would get domains in the results and not what I'm seeing now. It frankly gives me a creepy feeling.

I'm perhaps jumping to conclusions. Bing values still keyword in domains. If Panda alters the value in exact keyword matches, then this is simply awful. I can't really put it into terms exactly. It would be like one entity teaking the stock exchange and then having the market crash. That's what I'm predicting here. Sedo? Your domains are worth somthing? That entire segment could be essentially decimated.

Don't underestimate this if it proves true. Forget about what Panda may or not mean. I see the internet and search results and domain names as an ecosystem. It all works together like an economy. It may appear that from out of nowhere, somebody decided to alter the world economy in one foul swoop.

[tedster]

I do see some kind of shuffling around exact-match domains. I wouldn't expect it to be extreme, since exact-match websites are quite likely to be very relevant.

I don't think that this is part of the Panda or "quality" metric, however. There are many other segments to the total Google algorithm, and domain names fall in there.

[suggy]

Agreed. I have keyworded domains doing well post panda and have noticed others have too. If anything one could claim a slight boost in my shopping niche.

[Simsi]

That's what I'm predicting here. Sedo? Your domains are worth somthing? That entire segment could be essentially decimated.

Not a bad thing IMO. Not a fan of domain squatting even though I join in from time to time - easy money :)

As for keyword domains I have some and haven't seen any changes worth noting since Panda. But I think *most* of the strength in keyword domains is that most natural links will include the keywords rather than in an actual weighting for the words in the name. Consequently I think there will be a correlation in the down-grading of keyword domains and IBLs.

[MrSavage]

Here is an update. Search in quotes "Apple iPad 2" and you can go pages and pages (I gave up) and not see appleipad2 in any domain. Of course on Bing, being more like the former Google does show domains with appleipad2 in their domain name.

So, what I see is Google going from say a number of 100 to zero.

And yes if this is true or remains true, then they have essentially taken a turd on anyone involved with the internet, domains or making money online. You could argue whether keywords in a domain should have value or not. The fact is IF YOU DO have exact keywords or phrases in your domain then it's obvious to the searcher what your site is about. It makes sense. For Google to pull the plug like this is shameful.

I've said this already in different ways. Google could be thought of like the US economy. The government. The ones deciding how valuable the dollar really is. So doing this with domains and keywords is like the government just deciding one day to alter and mess with that value. Fair? Hardly? Revolt by the people? You bet. Unfortunately people outnumber webmasters and domaineers by a slightly massive number. Trust me, if this is the new world, it's a very arrogant and inconsiderate move on Google's part. To an extent the ecosystem of the internet has been set. To "F" with that now is hardly ethical imo.

Edit:The way it works now, top level domains with keywords are worth a lot of money. People don't invest a lot of money in "green widgets" and launch spam. They don't pay and launch site and talk about "how to make soup" when the domain is "greenwidgets.com".

[tedster]

Google didn't think up this change all on their own. Many webmasters felt they were being unfairly outranked by keyword-match domains. To extend your analogy to the US Economy, there was a lot of counterfeit currency in circulation.

Those voices became rather loud last year - in forums, at conferences and many direct messages to Google. So Google said last fall that they would take another look to make sure that unfair ranking weight was not accruing just because of the domain name itself.

It's not like they just penalized keyword-match domains. microformats.org still ranks #1 for [microformats].

[Planet13]

Oddly enough, over the last week or so, I have seen sites with ONE keyword in a two-keyword phrase =in the domain name moving UP, while sites without the keyword in the domain name (but in the file name or file path) have been heading down.

Even the ehow result that had been around #6 through #8 for quite a while has drifted back to middle / last half of Page 2.

On the other hand, looking at non-US gogole sites, seems like keyword in domain is less effective.

[suggy]

MrSavage -- in your example you have branded terms, which is another thing entirely. You're bringing additional factors into play. Keyword domains still looks like a good strategy in my sector, so long as the search is generic (ie not brandname specific).

[MrSavage]

Tedster with respect, this is no small itty bitty issue. All the people asking right now what happened may have their answer. When it's at equilibrium, Google altered that and this "Panda" or keyword domain might just be at the core of the issue. It wouldn't take much. It was the evening out fact. You're not suggesting that if you want to write about laptop reviews that joe blows website is going to rank well in comparison to CNET unless joe blow has some keywords in his domain? Take away that evening out element and guess what? All you're going to see are big name sites and blogs.

I'm irritated at the notion that this is no big deal or what the masses wanted something done. That's idiotic thinking. How about the internet had some rules and keywords in domains were part of that. I really think you're ignorant to the issue here if you take this as no big deal. If the value of keywords in domains has been tweaked substantially to have next to no value, then as an upstart webmaster or a person earning some money from Adsense needs to re-evaluate. You better start writing about crap that 100 people care about instead of popular subjects. You won't get a sniff otherwise. I hope I'm wrong. The fact is keywords in domain was a balancing out and made for an equilibrium between giant sites and the little guy.

Unfair ranking because of the domain name itself? Seriously? If a site is shoes.com I would hope it's a shoes authority. If a site is named greenwidgetreviews.com I would suggest that's pretty compelling. I think Tedster what you're talking about is a bunch of complainers who are too cheap to buy a domain name, missed the boat on getting the domain, aren't smart enough, or are griping about their rankings.

I come at this from the perspective of the little guy. Not sure what percentage that represents but I'm sure 90% of the people on Adsense make less than $500 a month. I simply DO NOT see the little guy in the searches right now for searches that are remotely popular. I know the culprit and I'm standing by that. Forget about ads this or ads that and Panda.

[tedster]

It was also little guys that were complaining, MrSavage. You're coming at this from the perspective of someone who lost in this change. Other little guys were helped.

Rankings should not depend on having money... isn't that a commonly heard complaint? So why should someone who can't afford an expensive domain name have a level playing field, if in all other ways their content is superior.

Everyone I know who has plays the exact-match domain game knows that it was not going to be forever. just as everyone I know who played the MFA game knew that it was not going to be forever.

That doesn't take away the sting of lost income. I fully and completely appreciate that. However, when it comes down to matters of principle, removing any ranking advantage given only because of the domain name is a strong and well-principled change.

Every algorithm change restructures the ecosystem of the web - always has and always will. Google does not owe us an unchanging ranking engine. Every ecosystem that exists anywhere does so only by changing.

[MrSavage]

This story isn't written just yet. There is an obvious flux in the system. Did I lose? Not entirely. I'm looking at the big picture and not just through personal bias. I'm trying to understand the results that I'm seeing right now.

My conclusion seems at this point that Google is taking your search and really modifying those results to what they think you want. I'm trying various thins in quotes and still getting very odd results. If I searched in the past "geenslime" assured I would find greenslime.com or similar domains. If in the past you typed greenslimethattastesgood, you would get something along the lines of greenslimethattastesgood.com. That's relevant to what I'm looking for. I'm essentially searching for domains when I put the words together like that. In the past, that's the way. Now there seems to be a result which says okay, you are lookingforthisdomainname but we think you really want to see wikipedia or cnet.

What you're failing to think about is that Google has essentially become the currently that we deal with. No fault of their own. The internet has essentially become dependent on that currency.

In closing, if in fact I'm right about keywords in domains and significant drops in value, then you most likely will find my predictions to be true. You site will get squashed in the Google search. Why? Well because now you need daily updates, good twitter followers, lots of +1's, tons of deep content. That's your only way in. Before, you might get a bit of an edge if you targeted some specific subject so that you could avoid getting squashed. You want the commercialization of the internet? Panda is providing that now. That's the direction I see happening. I don't think this is quite as complicated as everyone is making this out to be. Take the popular searches and sure you get nothing but quality.

If Google was looking for that tipping point this is it. If you got increased traffic from Panda it's because others got squashed. It's not like your site suddenly got more interesting. How the hell do you know if those ad removals and tweaks did anything? Your improvements might likely have some without any doing of your own. It may have simply been the shifting of the plates. Confused yet?

How this works with what I see:

result 1 - official site
result 2 - cnet
result 3 - engadget
result 4 - youtube
result 5 - wikipedia
result 6 - slashgear

etc, etc.

See the goal is accomplished. Quality search results! No content farms! Yay it's great isn't it? Well not for us the content creators but as a dishwasher do people give a rats a** about us? Technically Google could have done this in the beginning. If you take the biggest sites on earth, certainly they have all the quality and all the twitter followers. Therefore this quest for quality didn't take a rocket scientist. All you have to do is get the traffic volumes and likes, and then you're safely away from spam and cruddy little niche websites that apparently have no business being on page 1 of Google search results.

[walkman]

Up to a point an exact match domain is probably the surest way to guess what the site is relevant for. Especially if the name was registered in 1995-6-7-8.... That's not going to change and short of a human review, Google relies on educated guesses. Now a domain name like really-cheap-golfclubs-4-sale.tld might set off a flag or two.

If you take the biggest sites on earth, certainly they have all the quality and all the twitter followers. Therefore this quest for quality didn't take a rocket scientist. All you have to do is get the traffic volumes and likes, and then you're safely away from spam and cruddy little niche websites that apparently have no business being on page 1 of Google search results.

Yep, Google took the easy way. We have been noticing this trend since the brands update. Putting Macys or Gap #1 for jeans or and the likes it's the safest way for Google, no way they can be blamed by the searcher and it's in Google's economic interest to do so too. So fill the first 2-3 pages with top brands and don't worry.


With Panda they just made sure that 'low quality sites' got wiped out update by update and even the long and long-long-tail went to bigger sites. I have to wonder what all those PHDs do all day, I'm dead serious .

[edited by: walkman at 8:58 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2011]

[MrSavage]

If you think about there are 2 factors in search. First site popularity/size vs keywords in a domain. Yahoo was laughable in that regard, most people knew it. Is search really this simple? Apparently it is.

So it's a balancing beam. One side big massive site and on the other side is keywords in domain. Take away importance of keywords in domain? Exactly. All the weight in now with the big massive sites. To my mind, it's all really this simple. Sure it's more than just keywords in a domain that helped one compete with the giant sites, but when you start including popularity, it's a done deal. A keyword in domain was about your only defense to a giant site, but that was then and this is now.

The cynical part of me thinks this. Of course this negative thinking may change as Panda sorts itself out, if it ever does sort itself out. As ask this.

Is it possible that Google doesn't need Adsense as much? Is it possible that there are so many blogs and websites that their income is now saturated and that they simply don't need those Adsense ads to get the traffic they once did. If you think about it, they needed the little sites to get noticed because those ads needed to get placed and to see traffic. With the apparent disregard for smaller sites, it just makes me wonder if that need went out the window. Certainly Google needed to have situations where Adsense got noticed and I'm not saying they did anything to set it up that way. But what I'm saying is that do you think now they simply don't give a S about the ramifications of those Adsense reliant webmasters?

I think from what I'm experiencing thus far, it's those Webmasters suffering the most. It's a theory nothing more. Adsense publishers are becoming the dishwashers and with the mixed messages about ad space affecting Panda is almost contradictory. Perhaps they get enough big money contracts from the CNET's to counter loses from the smaller Adwords streams. Why will Google give us huge ad placements if that means it can drop us from rankings? Should they have a disclaimer that use this ad only when you have thousands of words and content on the page? Afterall, you put that ad up and you lose that traffic, you aren't making F all from that ad.

Bah, I need a nice massage right now. I'm not trying to be an alarmist but what I see is scary. It's not so much today what I see, but it's the direction this is going. It's too early to tell. It scares me that people are dismantling their entire site to hopefully, and I do say hopefully, get traffic back to what they had before. Sorry to say but that's a true gamble and perhaps a new line of work is time more well spent. I hope I'm wrong about this. On the surface there is only one true way to maintain a spam free index. That's an index that doesn't really have room for me. Say Google can do what they want? Perhaps. I don't think collectively that webmasters are smart enough or organized enough to say anything collectively. There aren't enough casualties just yet. Afterall, some people now think this is great they got increased traffic. Those fools fail to realize that it's because sites have been dumped. If those sites are allowed to come back, then you will have a hate on in a couple months. It's the roller coaster. Nothing is worse than unstable. Nothing.

In closing, I hope my outlook changes. I just think some people are avoiding the reality at how massive this Panda business really is. The way I feel, is that essentially the rules of the internet have been hacked and wacked. Apparently it's for the betterment of Google search they say. Let's see about that. What are they afraid of? Spammers were winning out so it's time to dump the secret sauce and create a new one? Has Bing really taken that big of a bit out of the pie? I don't think so. I don't get it. The internet is different now. Clueless me didn't know about Panda until this past couple weeks. Don't worry, you'll hear from others most likely who are like hey, wtf just happened?

[walkman]

MrSavage, it's an open secret - October 13, 2008 :
[news.cnet.com...] to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the Internet is a "cesspool" where false information thrives. As reported by AdAge, Schmidt was addressing his remarks to magazine executives who were on a pilgrimage to the Googleplex.
....
Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool, and of course he is right. The corollary is that advertising via Google and its brethren is an essential way to build and sustain a brand.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's google doing what they said they would do. This is why many Pandalized sites will probably never come back. And I'm not talking about spam sites, but sites 'you see nothing wrong with.'

Bah, I need a nice massage right now. I'm not trying to be an alarmist but what I see is scary. It's not so much today what I see, but it's the direction this is going. It's too early to tell. It scares me that people are dismantling their entire site to hopefully, and I do say hopefully, get traffic back to what they had before. Sorry to say but that's a true gamble and perhaps a new line of work is time more well spent. I hope I'm wrong about this.

I have been seeing the writing in the wall, but Panda just came 6-12 months too early for me. I still have plan B, my 401k is all in cash now.

Regarding adsense i think it's the different goals of different teams. The adsense team must get a bonus on sales or something, after all someone has to pay the bills. For a public company it's this quarter that matters.

[Swanson]

As far as I can see changing the ranking for sites with keywords in the domain is not a Panda update.

My observations are limited obviously but my own exact match domains are doing better than ever - however the reason is because what is on those domains.

I made sure that my exact match domains were a "brand" in their own right with great content, excellent functionality and real benefit for users. Much of the content is from Merchants so is duplicate - so if Panda was in play to such an extent then all my thousands of sites should have gone or lost traffic, that is not the case.

I would agree that Google is changing the way they look at exact match domains (well, because they said they would) but as in anything now there is much more going than just one factor. If they turn down the signal for keywords in domain then you have to have more quality in all the other areas that now in play, and that includes Panda.

So if they have turned down the strength of the domain - then yes, indirectly Panda and all the other algo factors are now more dominant.

[Swanson]

It just occurred to me that maybe keywords in the domain could be an issue depending on the type of site and the "quality" of the site (which Panda was designed to measure).

When is a keyword search a search phrase, and when is it a search for a "brand"?

If you use more data to try to figure that out then when you incorporate the sort of scores Panda was designed for then you can start to get an idea if the site was designed to get traffic purely on the basis of the keywords, or it was designed for "added value".

So, it would make sense to add a "keyword in domain" factor to go side-by-side with Panda scores.

Maybe it's "another sign" of a site designed just to get traffic from Google which is what Panda (I feel) is all about.

I think that Panda is a real attempt at learning what MFA is - is this site made to generate money from being in Google's search results, and if so how much added value does it give.

So I think you can still be seen as MFA (and I really mean made for Ads not Adsense) and be fine if you pass a much stricter set of criteria. However, the collateral damage from the Panda updates show that it is not an exact science and that is why there have been regular updates and I am sure will be many more ongoing.

[MrSavage]

Swanson you make a lot of sense.

Personally I think Google is finding out just how fine a balance the internet really is. It's either they didn't care about the lives of people who help put people in the seats, or they felt their search is so broken that they needed a major overhaul. I laugh if it's a major overhaul because isn't the crappy businesses that need to reinvent themselves? If McDonalds was going out of business, sure they might tinker with the special sauce. That's how I thought smart businesses run. Panda was a warning shot? They foresee an invasion of some sort that requires a total revamp? There was revolt and endless websites about how bad the Google search results have been?

I suggest this, a simple view. What I see, read, and have experienced, Google has not been transparent about what they are doing and have upset a LOT of people. I read the stories. This to me is a government that decides one day to raise the interest rate by 3% for the good of the nation. You're broke? Lose your home as a result? Well tough S. It's our nation and we're running it and if you don't like it, then vote us out of office. One thing is missing from the Google internet equation. Make a guess which part.

I'm fired up obviously. I haven't been active here in a while. I think the Panda issue needs some real voices that need to be heard. Perhaps t-shirts that say something like, "Google introduced Panda and all I have left is this lousy t-shirt".

It may not sound like I'm a Google fanboy but I am. I've had them as a homepage for years and actually allowed me to make some side income. Most of my frustrations with Google has ultimately been my own doing. Panda goes far beyond anything I think as a collective we deserve.