Organic SEO

[michaelmc]

Hi folks,

Is there any impact on google page rankings for a site that had key words within a domain name that had .co.uk vs .uk for example.

Just wondering if the assorted new amount or domain name endings impacted ranking.

Thanks

 

[Nico Albrecht]

The short answer is No. SEO is greatly affected by following. Redirects - Age of domain -link structure of your site & Speed of website - do not go cheap on hosting. You want load times under 3 seconds, google got tools to measure that. Domain hosting availability - make sure you register with a good domain registrar that is not down half the time. Make sure website is responsive. Content - provide good content 250 - 400 words make sure all got H1 H2 tags, meta etc..., tags in pics and description. Tell google you got a site in webmaster and monitor your organic bounce rate. Back links that match the content of your site etc... the domain name itself doesn't affect your rating but all the other ones I mentioned do. There are many more factors but they are the most important ones:

Redirects
Speed of site
Content of site including keyword density
Responsive to device
age of domain
back links that match content
updated content on your site
link structure on your site
Tags and Meta Data - Rich snippets etc...
organic bounce rate
SSL certificate is a tricky one

Make it as easy as possible for a crawler - machine to understand what you are up to.

 

[michaelmc]

Thanks Nico, so nothing being within the domain name affects search? I had always thought having key words within your domain name helped when searched

 

[fisicx]

It used to but not any more.

In any case, keywords in your domain name can work against you. Suppose you have 'trurodogwalking.co.uk' and decide you want to start cat sitting. That domain name no longer helps.

But if you are micheaelmc.co.uk you can do whatever you want.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

I don't want to make this one in a full SEO discussion and this is my personal view after doing seo in house. There are to many useless companies out there.

I go back to the structure of a domain and explain better. Try to get as many keywords in your domain link correctly and plan that well.

Example: www.testdomain/product/location/category/subcategory or brand/product/type of product/variations

I run a data recovery business and my structure would look like:

www.domainname/data-recovery/belfast/hard-disk-drive/seagate/barracude. your domain ending

Try to get as many keywords in and stay around 8 maximum. In my exmaple we have 6

data-recovery-belfast-hard-disk-drive-seagate-barracuda

I can now easily change the location in there and replace belfast to london for exmaple.

Structure and plan well. After that it is very hard to change with back links to your site.

 

[fisicx]

URL stuctures like that can raise flags in the googleplex. You be lucky but this sort of micro managed keyword thing just isn't necessary.

Google is looking for content - the page content needs to reflect the 8 keywords, the URL is (mostly) irrelevant. Even the folder structure means very little.

As to backlinks, Google has long been wise to keyword rich anchor text and can penalise you for doing do.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

I agree with that as well. The only way to find that actual out would be testing it against each other. I do not think the domain ending would have any effect on the actual ranking in bing or google. The rest is up to testing and personal preferences.

 

[Dizz]

URL stuctures like that can raise flags in the googleplex. You be lucky but this sort of micro managed keyword thing just isn't necessary.

Google is looking for content - the page content needs to reflect the 8 keywords, the URL is (mostly) irrelevant. Even the folder structure means very little.

As to backlinks, Google has long been wise to keyword rich anchor text and can penalise you for doing do.

Thanks for that I did not know it before. I think I need to reconsider my on-page SEO soon

 

[MaureenP]

Hi folks,

Is there any impact on google page rankings for a site that had key words within a domain name that had .co.uk vs .uk for example.

Just wondering if the assorted new amount or domain name endings impacted ranking.

Thanks

Domain ending with top level tld or second level domain tld can't impact positive/negative on google page ranking. So you can take any one of them. But yes many other important factors such as website speed, onpage seo, content of the website, user experience, ssl certificate, backlinks will impact google page ranking.

 

[StevePoster]

Keywords within the domain name will not help you at all. It must be the content that are organize in your site url structures in which the search engine will understand on what will be the specific page to deliver for the target users.

 

[Mark_Taylor_]

I also agree with the above, years ago the domain / keyword thing was a big deal.

These days its not a factor from going on my findings at least.
A good clean, semantic url structure, that match the on-page content / keywords.

Also consider image filenames to a point as well, I've noticed pretty good improvements in google image search SERP results by giving image filenames a semantic name rather than a random filename.

 

[webgeek]

TLD matters, but .co.uk vs .uk likely does not.

I'm sure we could make a list of toxic TLD's... Or try using a foreign TLD and see how you rank in the UK.

 

[Mark_Taylor_]

Yeah for sure, a uk store should be .co.uk or .com (both in some situations) i'm also not sure about the .uk as none of my clients have gone down this path yet.

It would be interesting to find out if anyone here knows the answer.

 

[Paulgcqa]

Not anymore.

 

[OZ Limo Hire]

yes domain always impact in google ranking.

 

[fisicx]

yes domain always impact in google ranking.

No it doesn't.

 

[comperio]

yes domain always impact in google ranking.

Of course! How could google not evaluate the domain name of a website in its ranking assessment for a given query?

But then recently exact match domains have lost their edge, and they did the same a number of years ago too. So the weight of this ranking factor waxes and wanes, like all of them. But it matters, directly and indirectly, in the algorithm.

 

[fisicx]

But it matters, directly and indirectly, in the algorithm.

No it doesn't

 

[comperio]

No it doesn't

So you are saying if you register bestdentalservices.co.uk or rmg07nd5sjf7h.co.uk (assuming they are available), there is no difference in google's eyes for ranking dentists related queries. Interesting!

 

[fisicx]

amazon.com does far better than books.com for selling books.

eBay does just fine as does etsy, Tesco and many others without a single keyword in the domain name. It's the content on the sit that matters not the domain name.

Google used to reward EMDs but chucked it out back in 2012: http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340

 

[comperio]

yes only people in the field know how well emd work or not, and as I said the factor weight changes over time.

But then recently exact match domains have lost their edge, and they did the same a number of years ago too. So the weight of this ranking factor waxes and wanes, like all of them.

 

[webdesignnewcastle]

I agree with Fisicx, totally correct.

 

[webgeek]

The reasons the keyword based name might outperform the long random character domain name:
1) CTR - people will click on a keyword domain in search results much more frequently than they will a domain full of random crap
2) Direct Traffic - people are much more likely to remember the keyword based domain and type it in again later
3) TLD Penalty - some domain TLD's are known to be spammer havens and inherently perform less effectively than those 'normal' TLD's

These are not the traditional reason, which is the fact that the keyword in the domain and therefore keyword in the URL are present, which had a boost at one point in time. They can however influence rankings, since all three are known influencers of rankings (search result CTR, returning direct traffic and spammy TLD's).

 

[comperio]

^ yes this is what I meant by indirect reasons.

In addition the algorithm uses weights for its ranking factors, and the weights vary. This is how they tweak the algorithm, by changing the weights (among other things).

What was true in 2007 or even 2 or 1 year ago, is not necessarily going to be true today or tomorrow. But giving a weight of zero to a factor equates removing it totally from the algorithm. And why would they do that?

 

[fisicx]

But giving a weight of zero to a factor equates removing it totally from the algorithm. And why would they do that?

Because the factor was misused.

It's not going to be zero, more like 0.00000000001 when compared to the page title which may have a weighting of 100.

 

[webgeek]

That weighting of factors is where the money is at. Knowing something is a factor can lead to you spending an equal amount of time on optimising it, despite it having a .000001% chance of improving your rankings.

If people could simply remove the royal screwups with their site (slow, dupe content, canonical issues, etc), and then focus on the top 4 or 5 factors, like title, first paragraph, content quality and depth, +++) they'd likely get the biggest possible return on their time investment.

Somewhere in this, the equation might point to backlink building, social validation signals, and other items as well.

Personally, I'd rather choose a short, memorable, Purple Cow, type name, in the hopes of giving people something they can recall, start to type in the address bar, and which autocomplete then fills in for them.

Keyword rich domains rarely have this... If I'm a shopper who's viewed 10 pages with bathroom tiles, I might have visited tileworld, tilemountain, tilegiant, tilesdirect, tilemagic, tilechoice (yes these are all in the top 20 or so results for 'bathroom tiles'). If I start typing tile into the address bar, what's Chrome (or Opera or other browser) going to put in there? Who knows - but it likely won't be your tilebazaardomain - it's just a % game.

Victorian Plumbing, Fired Earth, Topps, Wickes - I could remember any or all of these. Especially if the minute I land on one, there's a niche, a theme, something I can identify with visually and have the image burned into my retina so I don't ever forget.

In USA there was a computer store, 'Computersmart', that advertised on the radio - "Cheaper than a really big toaster". On the wall of each store's showroom was a toaster that had to be 3 feet tall. It wouldn't really toast anything, but it looked like a real toaster. People identified with that like gangbusters. It wasn't that clever - but it was that memorable.

I remember John Lewis because of that wicked warranty that makes my actual price seem much lower, knowing the TV will last 5 years. I've forgotten a thousand other sites with TV's which are cheaper, many of them with keywords in their domains.

Moral of the story: Be remarkable. Be memorable. Don't sacrifice either of these for one of your search algorithm factors you're pursuing.

 

[comperio]

It's not going to be zero, more like 0.00000000001 when compared to the page title which may have a weighting of 100.

This is a 10 trillion ratio, is it? You must have done a lot of testing to be so sure and precise about that.

Of course anyone can choose the domain name they want, you do not have to have keywords in your domain. It is common knowledge that this is not a very high factor as anyone can find out by doing a quick search on google. But it is not zero or near zero either (but this you may not find out so easily, unless you test it)

 

[fisicx]

Those were just made up numbers. The point being that keywords in the domain name have a tiny ranking factor compared to other signals.

And I have tested this. I ranked a site with a junk domain name higher than a site with a keyword domain name.

But as @webgeek suggests, keywords in the domain may have secondary benefits. But they may also be a big disadvantage.

 

[Ventraclothes]

Google Organic traffic based on your target location in google webmaster tool. The Possum Algorithm updates for local searching by Google.