There is no denying the fact that keywords in the domain used to be a very powerful way to be the first in Google SERPs for those keywords. Well, don’t get me wrong, I am speaking about:
- exact match (if you happen to own “weightlossguide.com”, chances are it will be found in top 5 for this exact phrase without too much effort from your side);
- .com domains (more often than not: sometimes it does work for .org or local TLDs but usually if those compete with .com domain, they will lose: see the second example here).
We have discussed this issue exactly one year ago, and many also noticed other search engines to look heavily at keywords in domain names.
However search engines are reported (or rather expected) to be putting less and less emphasis on keywords in domain names for two reasons:
- this has been abused by spammers registering hundreds of “long-tail” domains to rank them for exact match;
- today it is almost impossible to get hold of any “exact match” domains that wouldn’t be too long or pointless.
For the above reasons I almost stopped considering the tactic. But one thing brought me back to it.
I love screenshots and recently decided to collect most awesome ones I happen to come across in one place. For that reason I decided to register a domain funnyscreenshots.com and in just a few days (with absolutely no backlinks at that time by the way – I didn’t even expect it to get indexed so quickly) I noticed Google referrals for the exact match. I understand there is almost no competition but isn’t it too fast anyway?