In page titles, how do engines see keyword vrs keyword.com?

And how about on the page?

[Robert Charlton]

In page titles, how do engines see keyword vrs keyword.com?

This is a question that I've never answered to my satisfaction. Way back (so far back that I was using AltaVista as my prime research engine), I asked the question on another forum.

The only opinion I got then felt that the engines saw keyword and keyword.com as different words, even in titles. What had prompted the question was that a site I was working on, the company name was DomainName.com. The site, whose home page title had been "Welcome to DomainName.com," was ranked #1 on AV for the single keyword "DomainName" -- and there were no onsite factors to have caused this.

I attributed the ranking to the use of "DomainName.com" as the link anchor text in several hundred external affiliate links. I've had other sites perform similarly. If the engines parsed out "DomainName", I reasoned, they must be seeing it as a separate word. But "DomainName" also appeared in the URL as well as the title, so the reason for the ranking wasn't entirely clear.

With a title like "Widget.com - widgets for keyword2", eg, would I be targeting both of the phrases "widget keyword2" and "widgets keyword2"? It occurs that if the engines see a period as they see a comma or a "/" in a title, which is to say as a space, then I would be targeting both phrases.

I also wonder about how this works on the page... whether the period is also seen as a space, if it is seen that way in the title.

[Brett_Tabke]

It's so proprietary to each indexer, that it is impossible to make generalizations.
keyword.com in tiltes, tags, descriptions and page text, is generally viewed as one word. However, there are engines we know that break apart the main body content into sentences and paragraphs. The way I see it, they break it down on p tags, br tags, divs, tables and periods. You can best test that by searching for phrases in "quotes" that span over any one the elements I just mentioned.

I use them both Robert.

[Robert Charlton]

>>You can best test that by searching for phrases in "quotes" that span over any one the elements I just mentioned.<<

Quotes were of course a great idea... Why didn't I think of that? ;)

For title search, I tried comparing two strings in a title I know is indexed in the main engines, searching with and without the period preceding com.

For the searches...

"DomainName.com - word1 word2"

and...

"DomainName com - word1 word2"

...the results were identical on Google, Fast/Lycos, and AV. Ditto for WiseNut, with an interesting twist... on WiseNut, "com" was not highlighted on either search, so perhaps it's treated as a stop-word in titles.

On AskJeeves and Teoma, neither engine would respond to the full string... I had to reduce the comparison to "DomainName.com" and "DomainName com" - and the results were the same. Here body text as well as title text might have entered into it.

I couldn't get any of the Inktomi engines to respond to a search that included the "com" -- they told me to check my spelling.

The only engine I tried for a string in the body text, with and without the period, was Google, which apparently treats the period as if it were a space... same results for the string with or without the period.

I don't know whether this tells me that the engines would see "DomainName" in "DomainName.com" as a separate word in a title if the search were competitive, but on a unique domain name, it does seem to see it separately.

Any other interpretations? I've been trying to nail this down for a while.