Growing Your Business With Google
By Dave Taylor

Does domain name affect search engine ranking?

Dave, does your domain name impact your SERPS (search engine results placement)? That is,if you use a nonsense name, will it negatively impact your search engine ranking? Would "www.thebestsearchengine.com" rank better than "www.google.com" for the query "best search engine"?

There are hundreds of different variables that modern search engines consider when determining which of the thousands - or millions - of results should be presented in the top slots, one of which is definitely the domain name of the site.

Other variables include the age of the domain registration, the last time the DNS record was changed, how recently the page was changed, how many other pages point to the page in question, how those other pages link to the page, whether the words in question appear in the title of the page, in a header, how frequently the key word or words appear in the text, and on and on and on.

Indeed, we don't actually know the exact formula and there's an entire industry of people trying their very best to figure it out and then remarket the specific tactics and layout suggested by their experimental data (and guesses). They're Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) and ...

Article continues at: Does Your Domain Name Affect Your Search Engine Results?

Category: Google Q&A (Article #5853)

Andrew Sikorski says... << Growing Your Business with Google >> Google Toolbar Gets Personal

Comments

Can you suggest whether I can use two domains for the same site. I want to have a site with .co.uk and .us and will use same site in 3 copies. Is it legal.

Posted by: Rajesh at September 17, 2006 1:17 PM

Great question, Rajesh. I would suggest that you cannot, or at least should not have the same content under more than one URL. The problem is what Google calls a "duplicate content penalty". In a nutshell, don't have the same content accessible through more than one Web page address, whether it be different domains or just different pages on the same domain.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at September 17, 2006 2:02 PM

What about purchasing another domain and simply redirecting it to the original location of my content?

Posted by: Michael at March 1, 2007 8:20 AM

Michael, that can be a viable solution, but you need to ensure that you don't get into a situation where you have the same page of content accessible through more than one URL. That is, if you have, say, xx.com as your existing domain and also want to have yy.com, you need to make sure that you use what's called a 301 redirect so that when people -- and search engines -- go to yy.com they are redirected to xx.com properly.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 1, 2007 9:12 AM

But will having multiple domain names redirecting to a single website actually affect search engine results? For example if I have brand name as the main domain name but point to it with several domain names that have keywords in them, will this help with organic search results?

Posted by: Sam at April 20, 2007 9:24 PM

if you 301 redirect domain1.com to domain2.com all links pointing to domain1.com will count as links to domain2.com.
so if you hade 5 page rank 3 links to domain1 and 5 page rank 3 links to domain 2 and you 301'd it would be the same as if
you just had 10 page rank 3 links going to domain 2

Posted by: chris at January 7, 2009 12:07 PM

I have a blogger blog and have never purchased a domain name, so my name is very long. I am concerned with losing seo. I was thinking of doing a redirect from my old verylong.blogspot.com name to a new simple address. Do you thing this is the best way to go? Will my seo get affected?

Posted by: Gina at February 7, 2009 8:59 AM

Will a domain name with the keywords separated by hyphens work as well as one without?

Posted by: samuel at April 26, 2009 7:47 PM

It is generally accepted that .com, .net and .org are the best three domain suffix's/ Will having a .us or .biz or .info decrease its ranking in the search engines or not. What's the main reason why .com, .net, and .org are the best?

Posted by: charles at June 24, 2010 11:07 PM

I don't think that the .com or .net domains are inherently better, I think it's more a factor that most of them have just been around for longer and have more content on their sites.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at June 24, 2010 11:12 PM

Dav, I have a domain which was made on the basis of Textile Engineering. But unfortunately there was a problem of indexing on that domain. So i made a subdomain and blogging over there.

Now the main domain is fixed and start to blog on the main domain as it is DMOZ listed and have PR3.

I would like to blog about Domain & hosting related topics there but the domain is related to textile and have a textile related keywords there.

What should I do now? Can i use that domain to blog about non-textile related topics? Will i have any problem with Google or SEO?

Thanks.

Posted by: Shamim at July 16, 2010 3:50 AM

I would say that you'll have no problems at all blogging about topic X on a domain that's about an unrelated keyword. If it's confusing to readers that might be an issue (like "best-life-insurance" being about knitting patterns) but otherwise Google will just evaluate each page based on its usual criteria. Good luck!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at July 16, 2010 7:16 PM

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!