Imagine me: I registered my first domain name in 1999. The selections back then were wide open...I could have had pretty much anything I wanted...
I have to admit how absolutely amazing it is that people register worthless garbage domain names and squat on them thinking they will make money selling them to some idiot. By 1999 most of the good .coms were taken. And I have experienced that where a domain name I wanted was registered the day or week before. When I look for a domain name, I enter a whole bunch of possibilities in a spreadsheet and bulk check them. I had to run over 800 possibilities before I decided on one domain name once.
Aw man that's the freaking worst! I've actually went on to buy some of those domains for MUCH more than they would have been had I thought of them just a few days / weeks earlier.
Yep, early to mid 90's was a goldmine. Still decent domain names circa 2000, just not the very best ones.
On the other hand, I owned several domains back in mid-2000's that I thought were great. Eventually, I dropped them since none of them proved to be anything special. I owned: iMustDate.com BazillionJobs.com FastJobster.com AmericanJobster.com and a few more that do not recall now. Back then I used Yahoo hosting. When I logged in a few months back I saw 20+ domains that I used to own with them. What project are you working on?
Not sure why you think these have any value? They don't seem very good to me. iMustDate.com for a dating website I presume? Those words sound like they come from someone who is desperate for a date, not exactly the image you want convey. Brandables are very hit and miss. You can hit a big payday, but the majority of the time you will struggle to sell the name. The much safer option is keyword domain names. I am yet to start the project. I was just researching domain names. It is a music project.
I agree with you. Back then I thought they were awesome (we're talking back 10 years ago). It was the same thing, I couldn't find anything decent, so I went for the second, third best. I actually laugh at some of the domain names I chose back then. iMustDate.com does sound pretty desperate. I remember some fake profiles were created on it (not by me) rather quickly though.
On a different note, since 2011 and especially 2013, having a keyword in your domain name doesn't have a huge (if any) impact on SEO. It would be silly for Google or Yahoo to still rely on it. You can have something like dubaduba.com and it will take off like mad if the content is good and you hit the right niche, etc. Don't fret over not having the right keyword in your domain name since it's not going to change anything anyway.
Having keywords in your domain name is still hugely important. Without even taking SEO into account, it is great to have a keyword domain name, because it is easy to tell what the site is about, and they are easy to spell and remember. Yeah there was the EMD update which downgraded EMDs, but that doesn't mean it's still not helping your SEO efforts. Reason being, if your main keywords are in the domain name, lots of people will naturally link to your site using your website name, which just happens to be the primary keyword you're trying to rank for.
But how? You're referring to being more brand-able which is, of course, a great thing. I am all for easy to remember domain names, but it doesn't have to be confused with SEO in its purest form. As an example. In your signature you have a site: newaffiliatehelp.com If I follow your logic, typing "new affiliate help" into Google should bring that site up in a hurry. Well it doesn't. Not on the 1, 2, 3 pages: https://www.google.com/search?q=new...s_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=new+affiliate+help&start=0 Right there there's a hole in your theory that keywords are useful for the domain names. I guess it may work in some cases, but when you deal with billions and billions of pages all that stuff becomes utterly insignificant.
I remember the theft of sex.com and allegations the thief made something like $60 million while holding that domain name. On another topic, a lot of people mistakenly think that longer domain names are no good. That is not true. Most people visiting a website will not be typing in the domain name. They will be clicking on a link from a search engine or elsewhere or visiting from their bookmarks. For me using Firefox, I only have to type 2 or 3 letters before relevant bookmarks are displayed and I just click on the one I am looking for. So I never type in the domain name for forums.digitalpoint.com, my daily news sources, or anything else. On the flip side, some people think worthless short domain names are better than good and longer descriptive domain names. Not true. I'd take a good, descriptive 15-letter domain name with keywords over a worthless LLLLL.com any day.
Google sucks. Google buries search results to force website owners to pay for advertising. Yahoo displays newaffiliatehelp.com #1 for the search "new affiliate help" (without quotes). Which kind of makes sense since that is the name of the website and not just keywords. You can find plenty of complaints from people about not being able to find their own website in Google even when searching for their site's name. I have a domain name that is also the name of my website (which contains very little content because I have not developed it yet). Searching for the site name (not the domain name) in Yahoo, it is #3. In Google, it is #226. No other website has that same name. Searching for the domain name + .com, it is #1 in both Yahoo and Google.
That's a poor example to use. It is not an established site, there are very few links pointing to the site. Fwiw I am not suggesting an EMD will rank on its own with no work. The EMD update made it even more difficult for this to happen. It is about understanding the behavior of webmasters. Many people will link to your site using your website name, hence the advantage you get with owning an EMD.