My competitor has my main keywords in their domain name Example: If "YYYY" is the keyword My competitor has domain www.YYYYYonline.com Their website is maybe 50 pages with no content and the keyword appearing maybe 30 times on the website My website has quality daily updated content, the keyword appearing over 100 times (no keyword stuffing here just good content and articles) over 2000 pages, quality backlinks with .org websites (real government websites), constantly SEO etc.. Will I ever outrank my competitor in Google as my domain name does not have the keyword?
To add the above post My competitor always appear on the first 5 results on Google whereas I appear on page 2-3
Next time try using the edit button instead of bumping The information you've given above is a bit vague. Are you trying to say that your competitor and you are focused on the same keyword? If that is the case, having that keyword in your domain name is certainly usually going to trump any matter of keyword stuffing, metas, alt tags, or even content. Anything he does along those lines will likely just boost his keyword popularity.
Sorry about the bumping, new to the forum... To clarify, yes we are on the same keyword. No matter what I do, cannot seem to outrank him as I don t have the keyword in my domain name. Any suggestions?
Focus on a different keyword, or register a variant of it in a domain name and forward requests to that domain to your site.
I thought about registering a variant of it in a domain name and forward request to my site Will Google penalize me for doing this?
No, not if you do a 301 redirect. Also, it is possible to outrank him with your current domain. While having the keyword in the domain is a positive factor in SEO, it's not the only one, or eve nthe most important. What you'll need to do, after you full optimized your page for that keyprhase, is build backlinks. Lot of them. Thousands, and then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. you'll need to use all link building techniques at your disposal. You're certainly at a disadvantage out of the gate. But what you want to do isn't impossible.
By becoming very active in the community your niche is in. By joining discussion in blogs and forums. By social bookmarking. By article marketing. By RSS marketing. Don't get me wrong. It doens't happen overnight. It can take years to accumulate tens of thousands of links. But you should start down the path now.
The last thing you want is a way too many backlinks too fast, let alone links that may not otherwise be relevant. I'd concentrate on content, a domain with your keyword and that 301 redirect as previously suggested. Backlinks will boost popularity and PR, or hurt it... Its not going to boost your rank for a keyword. That's what your content, domain, alt tags and metas are for.
I think you're looking at this all wrong. The search engines do NOT rank web sites. They rank URLs. The fact that YYYY apprears "30 times on the website" or "100 times over 2000 pages" has no bearing on how your rank for "YYYY". They are looking at the number of times the keyword appears and where it appears on each individual page and ranking the pages on the site separately. If your keyword is YYYY and your competitor's domain was YYYY.com then YES! He would have a huge advantage. With just a few backlinks with YYYY or YYYY.com as the link text, his domain would likely rank #1 for the phrase "YYYY". Domain names carry a LOT of weight when they are EXACT matches. But YYYYOnline.com is NOT an exact match. Having YYYY as a partial match in the domain name won't carry as much weight as if it were an exact match. It won't carry much more weight than having it in a folder or page name in the URL. The reason he is outranking you is likely because of his backlinks. Sites that link to him probably frequently use "YYYY Online", "YYYYOnline", and "YYYYOnline.com" as their link text. So his home page is naturally going to rank better because of those inbound links. But if you had similar quality and quantity of links pointing to an article at yourdomain.com/YYYY with the link text "YYYY" you'd rank similarly since he's really not getting much of a boost from the domain name itself... it's more because of the link text of his inbound links.
I sort of disagree. Here's my 2 1/2 cents: 1) Domain Name doesn't matter. I have a handful of branded domains that outrank sites with the keyword in the domain 2) It's not the number of inbound links, it's the quality of those links. Relevant niches, sites that have 'authority' are much more valuable than any 'ol link. Again, it's all about the quality of links and your choice of anchor text. A well-branded site, with quality links using the correct anchor text (of the keywords you're trying to capture on) will outrank all other sites because, well, it's a quality site. Take for example, my www.blackosama.com site, it ranks top 2 for 'funny obama pictures' (and several other keyword phrases) yet there's no inclusion of 'obama,funny,pictures' in the domain-name and there are only a few instances of those keywords on the actual content of the site, mainly because it's a picture site. That particular site outranks major sites, such as photobucket and keyword-style domains, heck it outranks almost 28 million other webpages. In conclusion and to reiterate, keywords in your domain don't make a worthwhile difference. Edit: The above is only my thoughts about Google. In my opinion (and experience) Bing pays much more weight to keywords in the domain name...
Where did I say that the "quantity" of links are more important than the "quality"? If your domain EXACTLY matches the keyword phrase, you will get a boost... no doubt about it... It's likely one of those 200+ ranking facts... IsDomainExactMatch. LOL That's the ONLY time having the keywords in the domain provides a noticable boost. Domains that exactly match a search phrase will definitely rank MUCH easier (with fewer and/or lower quality links) than will domains with partial or now match to the search phrase. I even said basically in the last paragraph that if yourdomain.com/YYYY had the same inbound links (same number, same quantity, same link text) as YYYYonline.com had that they would rank basically the same. The partial match in the domain might provide YYYYonline.com a tiny bit better a score for that one ranking factor (out of 200+) than having it only in a page or folder name in the URL as is the case for yourdomain.com/YYYY. But in the big scheme of things, the advantage in this case is negligible. My point is that EXACT match domain names help a good bit. But partial match (i.e. YYYYOnline.com for the search term YYYY) don't give much benefit. So I'm not even seeing where we disagree. LOL
I respectfully disagree with a couple of your points as well. I know what you mean here, but it's a little bit misleading. If the two have exactly the same backlinks, and have the exact same on page optimization, then the might rank basicaaly the same. But just having the same number, same quantity, and same link text doesn't necessarily make them every remotely similar. The quality of the backlinks can make the difference between the first page and the 100th page. I'm sure you knew that, I jsut wanted to clarify for others. I disagree here as well. If the search term is YYYY, then having a domain that is YYYOnline.com is a HUGE plus. It doesn't make them unbeatable, but it provides tremendous advantage. For example, lets use the search term 'rates'. http://www.google.com/search?q=rates&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rlz=1R1GGGL_en___US345&client=firefox-a Notice the first two pages consist almost entirely of URLs that have the term RATEs in them somewhere. www.bank[B]rate[/B].com www.x-[B]rate[/B]s.com www.bloomberg.com/markets/[B]rates[/B]/index.html www.skype.com/go/all[B]rates[/B] www.voipbuster.com/en/calling-[B]rates[/B].html HTML: That's not a coincidence. This is because having the keyword somewhere in the URL is a positive optimization factor. And a very strong one at that. check for almost any one work keyphrase and you'll find similar results. But it doens't mean they are unbeatable. There are a few other pages mixed in, but they have worked very hard for that position.
Thanks you so much for all your help! I will continue linking with quality sites in my niche, anchor text, content, content. Basically everything that all of you recommended I also inquired about the YYYY.com domain in order to do a 301 redirect . I just found out that it is for sale! I am looking at brokers to purchase it (well if is within my budget) Any domain brokerage service that any of you would recommend?