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