Main level domain keyword importance

[BigEasy]

I was curious what people think about the importance of your main keywords in your main domain name? (i.e. "www.mykeyword1-xxx.com" as opposed to "www.whatever.com/mykeyword1")

Do you think the keywords in the main level are less important than the anchor text of backlinks, more important, equal?

So far my experience has been mixed and therefore I can't draw any solid conclusions.

[T0PS3O]

Main question is branding in this situation. But for pure SEO it does help.

There's still lots of people who link to others with the URL only (no specific anchor text). By having keywordphrase.com you will automatically still get anchor text credit for those. and with relevant words in them.

See my thread about New Site Suggestions for an example. I just launched that shop and it already ranks for the KWs in the domain on all SE's. Without any anchor text optimization.

But to put it into perspective... I'd say about a dozen good anchor text link can overshadow the domain name. I'd take 12 quality links over a KW relevant domain any day. BLs are still more important.

[BigEasy]

That is kind of what I figured but it's good to hear about other people's experiences. Thanks Tops.

[Smyrl]

I do not have the experience to comment on advantage but just ready one persons algorithmic method of blocking referrer spam. He uses .htaccess and a rewrite statement to deal with domain names with two or more dashes.

Shannon

[BigEasy]

Not sure what you mean here, Smyrl?