Hello everyone, How much weight does Google place on keyword placement in a website's URL when it comes to SERP? Also, does additional words and "word order" have any importance? Hypotheticals: Keyword: "old pants patch" How much better is "www.old-pants-patch.com" vs. "www.my-trousers.com"? Is there a difference between "www.old-pants-patch.com" vs. "www.pants-old-patch.com"? Is there a difference in keyword value between "www.old-pants-patch.com" vs. "www.old-dirty-pants-patch.com"? Hopefully my examples aren't too confusing Thanks!
They do place emphasis on it. Go with exact match in the domain. That way all incoming links are forced to include the desired keywords, whether they intended to or not.
word order matters, but i would also avoid the dashes "-". But frankly build a brand name with links to your keyword would be better. like bestpants.com Hope that makes sense...
Here is how it works. If the key word is in the domain, that is a + then google looks for the amount of times you used the key word in your content. Try to use it at least 5 times if its a good key word. Hope this helps brandon
You can still rank well for "old pants patch" without having any of those words in your domain name. Anchor text and on page seo should have the "old pants patch" text in there
It doesn't make much of a difference but a little depending on what the user types in. If the common is to type in "patch old pants" and you have old-pants-patch.com and I have patch-old-pants.com and there was hypothetically no other difference to the sites then I would be in first place and your site would be in second. Google tries to match the exact words in order first and then it starts to guess what you really meant and then adds in other criteria after that. I did a test last year using 2 domains with very uncommon words and put them in different orders I did not link to either of the domains and just waited until google indexed them. When I typed the first keywords the 1st domain would show up in 1st pos with the 2nd domain in 2nd pos when I typed in the 2nd keywords the second site showed up first and the first site showed up in pos 2. Now google also changes their algorythm all the time so as this test was done in 2007 I still believe it to be the case but that's my opinion.
Thanks guys for the responses. A lot of you seem to be leaning "against dashes." From a SEO stance, isn't dashes supposed to be slightly preferable when aiming for exact keyword matches?
defintily helps in the long run. Notice that most top ranking sites for the keyword have it in the domain.