Premium Domains Have an Advantage?

Time and time again I see premium .com domains on the first page of the SERPs outranking sites they shouldn't be. When I say premium domains, basically those in the format "primarykeyword.com" the $xxxx+ domain names, the domains everyone competing in the niche wish they owned. Has anyone else experienced this and do you feel the search engines give more weight to premium domain names? It kinda makes sense they do so, as publishers would be much less likely to risk spamming a premium domain name, just sucks for the rest of us though...

 

Its why casino.com and sex.com is worth tens of millions. If you type in casino the fact that it is a case of keyword.com makes it show up first in serps.

It is fantastic actually. I have bought many domains because of this that do show up really high in serps without any PR.

Pete

 

Pete, the domain names I refer to have been bought up along time ago...

 

depends...theres a lot of combinations

 

Those single-word keyword domains are valued much higher for one reason. They are easy to remember and catchy. No one's going to remember i-buy-chips-from-casino.com; but they will remember casino.com very easilyl.

 

There's one combination of a premium domain name, hence their value

 

I do not think that keyword.ext domain have an advantage on a specific Serp. There are too many factor that play a role in the serp positioning.

 

I'm not sure which side of the fence I sit on here... I do agree that the SERPs show those great domains at the top, not always but in enough cases to prove your point.

I do have to wonder though about the whole picture. Since these domains are worth (and purchased for) tens of thousands of dollars, I'm sure the website owners have also spent a lot of money on optimization and marketing. This will no doubt have a major effect on the SE position.

The other plus to having such a domain is that lots of people will make links to your webpage. By default they assume that you are an authority based solely on the domain... I'm sure it makes a big difference.

That's why I'm not 100% positive that a good domain alone will get you to #1, but I am convinced the Search Engines give domains a lot of weight.

my2c.

 

Faulty assumption. Witness: Dog.com.

 

I hope so, I just purchased a keyword.com domain name (still refuse to look at my bank statement, at least until it starts to make me money). I think it would make sense for these domains to appear higher. As itsme said, the people who have these domain names probably paid alot for them and so, by rule of thumb,
www.dictionary.com will have better information than omgdictionary4u.com.

I also know for a fact that keywords in the domain name is given alot more weight in SERPs.

 

I always kind of assumed that the main benefit to a keyword.com domain from the SEO stand point was that any site that links to you pretty much has to use the keyword in the link, regardless of whether they're using an optimized text link, or just posting the URL that they're linking to.

That, and every time your refer to your own site in your copy, you get to repeat the keyword again.

Toonces51

 

I meant to say most owners probably spend $$ on optimization/marketing...

I do think that good domains get a major bonus in the SERPs... just not sure if it's enough to snag the #1 when the competition is tough.

 

itsme - from my observations the kind of ppl who can afford to spend a few K on a premium domain name have similar advertising budgets aswell, and because of this learning SEO isn't that much of a concern as they can afford to just pay for traffic. As I said in my initial post I really think they are just outranking sites based on the merits of having a premium domain, and that alone. You seem to be agreeing with the idea though.

 

No, I don't believe at all that SEs give more weight to premium domains names. But check out the backlinks to premium domain name...particularly the anchor text used.

Their ALWAYS getting great anchor text used even if the website is not using anchor text, but just the URL - www primarykeyword.com

It's almost by default these sites will rank better because SEs are still primarly link dependant and 'most' anchor texted used to link back to these sites are using the primary keyword.

And of course, there's the whole "domain age", in which case, these sites have been around for a while.

 

Pretty much... it's just that I've never seen conclusive proof (and probably never will) that a good domain on it's own will rank you at or near the top. I do agree that it makes a difference, and even though many folks say it doesn't matter, I'm sure it does... but since I can't prove it then I can't really push the idea either.

Also have any of you seen how these domains sometimes get extra info/links displayed in the SERPs?? Do a google search for SONY or AMAZON and look at the extra info included with the results. I have seen better examples but I can't remember them at the moment.

 

That guy was a pile of BS.

The real owner of dog.com bought fish.com a few months ago for one million dollars. Do you think he would be posting here acting like a newbie and asking for tips for his site?

 

The guy posting said it was a client of his; not that he was the owner. I totally believe they went with their design company for "SEO services" as well and that is what you get.

 

So someone that can spend a million dollars on a domain uses the seo service of someone who has to post at forums to see what he can learn?

What an idiot... he could of hired anyone here and would of had much better results

 

That's true, but how would they know that?

I'm sure that guy was one hell of a sales man though... or the owner of the domain was his next door neighbour's uncle's best friend or something!

 

Agreed, for the most part.

But...
cars.com
mp3.com

I mean, come on, LOL!

And, between two identical sites... Say someone ran a test and registered two domains and made the sites identical, pretend the dupe content penalty does not exist and lets say both sites are about widgets... Ok, one is named whatever.com and the other is named widgets.com and the targeting is identical down to the wire. I hate to admit it, but I think widgets.com would outrank whatever.com... To be sure I'd still like to see it, but...

Of course this has a lot to do with what is at the other end... Take ebay.com for instance <- Totally unrelated name... Ok, it's the name of the business but it's not auction.com and it's not onlineauction.com (thou auction.com might do better than onlineauction.com but it does depend).

Then you have all the premium names being used for, I don't know what they call this practice, but you're basically sent to a page of all cash links or some other bs, and this, I think, lowers the value and also the likeliness of visitors keying in random premium names into their browser just to see what happens. So, no, the traffic difference isn't all that, I still think ppls paying millions for these names are nuts, but hey... cars.com is doing very well, while most of them, however, do not.

If it were all that, I would've paid the however-many-thousand-dollars the squatter who's sitting on MY premium name wants, but I didn't think at the time it made that much a difference... And to this day, I still don't think it does, it really has a lot to do with what is at the other end.