Domain Name as Anchor Text

How do search engines 'see' anchor text?

[Swebbie]

Does anyone know definitively if having the keyword you want to target in the URL of the domain helps from an anchor text standpoint, if the site linking to yours only uses the domain name? Do the search engines see this:

anchor text = www.domain-name.com

in the same way as this:

anchor text = keyword phrase (just happens to be the same two-word phrase as your domain name)

I have a lot of inbound links where just the domain name or the full URL is shown in the anchor text portion, but the domain name is the two-word keyword phrase I most want to rank for in the search engines (plus the '.com' part, of course).

[wildegray]

Yes. The search engines read that just as anchor text-- that's all it is, right? It's a link, using a keyword rich phrase. The relevancy of the link is the same, so long as it is domain-name, not just domainname.

[sugarrae]

If you do a search on Google or Yahoo for:

keyword schmeyword

you'll see that Google would show the following domain name as www.keywordschmeywordonline.com - you'll also notice that when a domain has the keywords and is hyphenated, it appears as www.keyword-schmeyword-online.com (it appears the new version of MSN isn't highlighting/bolding anything from the domain).

I've always assumed that meant (them being able to highlight the words within the url regardless of no space existing or a hyphen between them) they were smart enough to extract smaller words from largers words - course, you know that they say about assuming things so take this all with a grain of salt. ;-)

Sidenote: Welcome [webmasterworld.com] to webmasterworld wildegray. :-)

[wildegray]

Suggarae -
Thanks, man, I don't think I would've had the time to find that page for awhile if you hadn't shown me. I tend to go straight to the action in all things, forums included. So, to demonstrate this point, in a way... you've been here awhile - are you a supporter? And if so, is it worth the cost? My company would gladly pay for it if the flow of new info is satisfactory; which, judging by the way my posts are answered at the open access level, it will be; just wanted to test the water for a bit first. Thanks again!
On another aside - ever tried the member area of SEMPO? I've been flirting with the notion there, as well.

[wildegray]

Oh yeah... about the anchor text in the domain name:
It will still read it, yes - it identifies the characters in the proper order; but I have a suspicion the relevancy may fall out a little here (nothing certain, but then, is there ever in this biz?).

[trillianjedi]

Hi Wildegray,

Is it worth it?

This one comes up a fair bit:-

[webmasterworld.com...]

There's some conversation on this in there and links to other threads about it.

In my opinion, WebmasterWorld is worth supporting simply because of the value we all get out of it. That alone is worth ponying up a few bucks a year ;-)

Back to domain names, and SugarRae's comment:-

smart enough to extract smaller words from largers words

That's also been my recent experience. I say recent as I believe this has changed in the last 24 months.

As you rightly say though, sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what they're capable of.

TJ

[angiolo]

Here there is an interesting Brett post:

[webmasterworld.com...]