Use my site for an example, the domain name url is: http://www.glenwoodfin.com and yet it ranks on page one for ‘reputation expert’ currently. GlenWoodfin.com has no relevant connection to keywords about ‘reputation expert’ yet I’m ranking highly in a competitive field. If you can’t find anything with a .com extension that has an exact match for your primary keywords, then you just have to do the best you can and bridge the gap with other SEO methods. I created GlenWoodin.com first, then later decided to offer content on ‘online reputation management’. I bought GlenWoodfin.com to have a voice using my name, then later decided to feature content on reputation management. Therefore, your selection of the keywords in the domain name are not the final chapter in your story.

It’s not the end of the world if you can’t get your exact primary keywords in the domain name with the .com extension, it just gives you an advantage. If you put up solid content and do additional off site SEO, you can beat most other sites; however, if you publish a site and that’s the last thing you ever do to promote your site, don’t expect great things if it’s a competitive market.

Rust never sleeps and if you are going up against other active SEOs, then it’s an arms race. If other sites publish a site with an exact keyword match and immediately beat you, it doesn’t have to be the end of the story. You can still beat them if you care for your garden with planting, watering, fertilizing and weeding.

Cut and dried, yes it helps you to buy a .com url with only part of your keywords in the domain name. There is a boost there. I would have an advantage with my site if I bought GlenWoodfinReputationExpert.com, but it’s not the end of the story.

To look at a bigger example, do a search for: ‘purchase a domain name’. Right now, Godaddy.com comes up number one because they bought a domain name thinking of branding rather than generic keyword searches, but they made up for it with other factors and have now become a household name. They would have been better off in the early stages to have purchased the domain name: DomainNames.com, but they didn’t, yet they are probably the number one seller of domain names.

The proverb about the tortoise and the hare is true…if someone has beat you to the feeding trough early in the race, the tortoise can still win with diligence in the long run.

Thanks Glen,
Tom

I have never seen any advantage to the .ws domain nmae extension for seo, but there are times when I buy it. For example, when I’m trying to completely own an exact keyword phrase, then I purchase all the domain name extensions for that keyword or keyword phrase. I also do it for brand protection.

In answer to your question, I’ve never had any indication a .ws estension has any power in the Google algorithm. You can still get it to rank, but it will be extra work.

From my memory, the .ws extension got bought out by a mulit-level marketing company and they created an awesome website telling you how great it was, therefore, it created a bunch of recruiters that would pump up its value, but their motive was profit, not seo. The .ws extension is as close to the bottom of my list for seo benefit as the .info.

I remember when Godaddy was promoting the .co extension, they gave me a call trying to get me to buy into it. They said it’s the new .com. I told them I would test it and get back to them. Unfortunately, the .co was at the bottom of the pail for seo, so I let them know my results. They asked me to name a price to have them fly me in and talk to the Godaddy employees about what works and what doesn’t and why. I never accepted, but I saved a recording of the voice mail because I considered it a compliment.

There is alot of buzz about .ws now.
It ranks faster blablabla.
Have you exp that?

Also like to learn from u about SEO.

Thanks!
T

Thanks.

This is not required to be number one in your country, but it seems to give you a boost thus saving yourself a lot of link building. Good content, basic on site and off site optimization can overcome almost any domain name extension. Buying a domain name with the with your exact keyword phrase can help a lot too. For example, if you wish to be number one for: Coolest Guy on the Planet, go for CoolestGuyonthePlanet.com. In fact, I purchased, http://www.CoolestGuyonthePlanet.net and it gave me a boost for that keyword phrase. The .com was not available. Adding throw away words in the domain name is a fallback position like: MyCoolestGuyonthePlanet.com. Google barely notices the word my in the ranking.

I believe the most powerful domain name extension for global dominance is the .com.

Unfortunately, it’s got one of the lowest seo boosts for any domain name extension. I’d say it was equivalent to a .info or .us.

Thanks in advance.

As far as buying the top level domain names for a particular country, Google wants to target location and using a .uk.co tells them you are in the UK, therefore they push a search higher in UK searches for that url. It has been said that hosting your site on servers in that country help to, but I have not tested that.

By the way, Google (like politicians) have made public statements that domain name extensions are all equal for ranking, but anyone that does seo for a living knows that’s just smoke and mirrors to keep the public in the dark.

However, as far as branding goes, .com is definitely better hands down.

I’ve seen this sort of thing all over the web and have always taken it as gospel but have yet to see an article that explains how/why in simple terms (I’m new to seo but have alot of experience in content management and such).

I dont suppose you could point me in the right direction?

Greg

I also have a .info domain. People say that .info can’t rank? I’m not to sure about that so im guna give it a try

Thanks again
Ty

I have a question:

One of my websites is a .co.uk. Can a .co.uk domain rank outside the uk for that keyword if the content and backlinks are the best etc…

whats your thoughts?…
Ty

This is an affiliate link, so they will pay me a bit for helping you get set up.

Some sites I’ve been working on this week are: http://www.WomenBuildingBridges.com and http://www.bradfallonnews.com/ .

Either way, thanks for stopping by and leaving a positive comment.

Also connected to this is whether it is better to add fewer letters before or after your keyword phrase? So, in the example above, is it better to add ‘i’ rather than ‘my’ before ‘blue pencil’? Would this be marked higher by Google because is it closer to the phrase you are targeting?

thanks!

After the Panda Update earlier this year, I will say that if you are in Germany and you want your site to rank number one in Germany, then a .de domain name extension is better than a .com. In 2010 it wasn’t as bifurcated before late February of 2011.

You have educated me on the .co domain name extension. I did not not it originated from Columbia. I do know that Godaddy pumped their sales staff to sell it as the new .com because it look similar, but there premium price of around $30 was a ruse.

I talk to them from time to time with suggestions which ended up in asking me to determine what I would charge them to come and do a training session: http://www.glenwoodfin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/GoDaddy.mp3” rel=”nofollow”>Glen Woodfin Possible Godaddy Training Session.

http://www.glenwoodfin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/GoDaddy.mp3

By the way, .co is the domain name extension of Colombia, so it would make more sense to use that for a site written in Spanish aimed at the people of Colombia than to use it as an alternative to .com

I just reread my post, I didn’t see a reference to .com being FAR better than all other domain name extensions. I remain confident that the .com, .org and .net FAR exceed the ranking of other domain name extensions for seo even as late as July of 2011. The .com and .org remain more powerful than .net. My .com exact match urls still beat the other top level domains, but the .org is close. The .net is lagging the .com and .org, but all three give one a boost in ranking on Google compared to .info, .biz, .us, .ws, .tv, etc.

Matthew Cutts was asked after the Panda Update if the top level domains were more ranked higher on a Google SERP than the others and he said he would have to check into it.

Glen

So I guess I’ll try to do both…get some high PR links and try to write some creative paragraphs and/or articles…

Thanks though for the article…I found some other things informative as well…

Thanks for sharing your insights.

Finding reliable information about SEO is very difficult. Every man and his dog is happy to share with the world what Google thinks and does. More often than not it is based on rumors and hearsay.

So thanks for sharing your empirical studies with us. Nothing beats that.

Have a great day!

I first started noticing the preference to the .com, .org and .net extensions when I would magically see them appear on page one for exact phrase domain name without doing any link building.

Therefore, I started doing tests to confirm it. As an online reputation manager, I typically buy all the extensions for their name. For example, I own GlenWoodfin.com, .org, .net, .co, .info, .biz, etc. I would put up WordPress blogs for all the extensions on the same day and the .com, .net and .org varieties would always race to page one without any link building, even though I had not put any content on the sites. The others would remain on page 12 or deeper. I’ve been doing this for years, so I’ve tested it enough to be confident in my statement.

I’ve tested it a few times in the last month after the Google Panda Update and it still remains a strong part of their algorithm. I have noticed that there seems to be more of a preference to purchase the exact phrase for your country’s primary domain name extension. For example, if I was in the UK, it would be a very good idea to purchase your exact match keyword phrase in your .co.uk extension if you are wanting to come up number one in the UK. Matt Cutts even said recently, it even helps to host your site on servers within your own country. I have not tested that out yet, but he made that statement in 2011 after the Panda Update.

By the way, that’s a great find on your part, thanks for sharing the link.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=129c167b77c0f75d&hl=en

Interesting discussion…

Of course, it would depend what keyword or keyword phrase you were shooting for. The more competitive the keywords are, the more important it is to get a .com, .net or .org. If you live outside the US, there may be better domain name extensions for your country. Feel free to share the keyword phrase that you are ranking for.

Matt Cutts of Google has said that if one wants to rank well in their own country, then they account for where the site is hosted. That would make having your servers in your own country as a ranking factor. Interesting.

If your primary keyword is ‘guitar’, then it’s best to get guitar.com, but as a second choice, GuitarOnline.com is fine. You’ll have to work harder to get to the top of the rankings; but it’s a big boost to have the word ‘guitar’ in the url. You’ll need to produce a quality site and lots of backlinks to beat guitar.com, but I think it’s worth pursuing. Guitar.net and Guitar.org are other good choices which are a bit better than GuitarOnline.com, but since you’re late to the trough, it’s a good starting place.

Never tried a net.co.uk or net and wonder if it was the only one left for a keyword domain whether it would rank better than a non exact keyword domain with com or co.uk?

I go for generic keywords for the name of my site and also in my url when I have competition of 10,000,000 or less. I geo target and product or profession target both the h1 tags and buy a domain name with the exact keywords in it. Otherwise, one can get any site to the top for any keyword phrase with enough backwards links to your site, especially if they carry the anchor text that you wish to be rank for, but who wants to build so many backlinks? I prefer to get a boost from urls where my primary keywords are in the domain name. I always use the Google Keyword Tool for a guide when making my keyword decisions.

In your case, I’d use the one your have for a branding url which is memorable and a great way for wordof mouth advertising; then, at the same time, I’d clone the site with your generic keywords in the url. I’ve had no problems with high rankings with cloned sites as long as you change the metatags and the h1 (on page) titles. Therefore, you’ll have two sites: your branding site: keycrushers.com and your other site seo-ed for the keyword phrase that you want to rank for. If your branding url eventually becomes a household word, then your branding url will eventually overtake your generic keyword stuffed url. In the early stages, the generic site will outperform the branded site.

Thank you for your thoughts. You can have the best content in the world, but if no one links to you, then it would be like winking at your girlfriend in the dark…you might have great content, but she can’t see your message. Simply having awesome content means nothing, because you could publish a site and never get indexed by Google even if you have the cure to cancer. I have hundreds of pages with powerful content that will never be in the Google index. I don’t link to them, I simply send a link in email to those that I want to see the page as I consider it private.

In order to get in the Google index, you either have to send them a request to index your site or a site that is already indexed has to link to your site period to even show up on a Google search.

Once one’s site is indexed by Google, then it goes through a series of evaluations at multiple data centers that Google has all over the world. The process is called the Google Dance. The site ranking can be very volitile during this process before it settles in to it’s more stable position.

I can give you and example of a site with almost zero content that ranks in the #1 spot for a Google search for ‘greenville accounting’. You can type it into Google yourself and check it or you can click on this search link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=greenville+accounting&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&pws=0

As you can see, there are over 8 million competing sites on a broad match for the keywords: greenville massage, yet my site ranks number one. Look at all the other real sites with actual content that I’m beating using the technique that I have described here.

Many times a movie will have a 100% Flash website which is practically invisible to the Googlebot, yet it will rank number one for the name of the movie because so many review sites link directly to it.

I do agree with you that if you can get a site indexed with remarkable content, then over time, it should come up high in the Google rankings by virtue of natural links where people are talking about it on their websites and social media sites like: Twitter and Facebook.

Glen

: )

All domain names and their urls have some value. Currently, for the Google algorithm, if you put the exact keyword(s) in the domain name that contains the exact keywords that you wish to rank for in a search, buying the domain name with the .com, .org or the .net will help you come up higher in that search. The others will not.

In your example, you wish to come up high in a search and compete with http://www.bptransparency.com in a search with the .net extension. You will be helping yourself if people are searching for ‘bp transparency’ in the search. However, if you think people are typing in ‘bridgepoint education’, then, you would need to purchase: http://www.bridgepointeducation.net. If you think they are typing in ‘bridgepoint education transparency’, then I’d recommend you purchase: http://www.bridgepointeducationtransparency.com or .net. For people that type in ‘bp transparency’ in a search, then you’d need to buy: http://www.bptransparency.net.

The only reason the owners of duckload.com might wish to buy you out is if you are creating problems for them. Most of the gurus and companies only buy the .com. I think that’s a mistake. I’d buy them all just to take them off the market…including duckloadscam.com and duckloadsucks.com.

Thanks for Your Patience in Awaiting My Reply, Glen Woodfin

Get your facts right before you talk?

Content is not king?

So why not have this page of yours blank and just see what happens?

Why are u shitting people with crap?

- AU All Star

thanks again

Please give me an example of what keyword phrase you were using for your search? I’ll analyze it.

In the mean time, my guess is that the search you used was a search where no one has purchased the .com, .net and .org urls with the exact keywords in the domain name. If you experiment with it, you’ll see that it takes a lot less link building to get those three to the top of page one than other domain names and their extensions.

Thanks for Your Thoughts, Glen

Last year reviews were a huge factor, not so much this year.

I think putting your site in every local directory still helps like: Super Pages, etc.

Since the SERP has now defaulted to a different state from SC to NC, you’d have to do a Google search for: greenville sc massage. We are number 2 in “Local” as of March 17th, 2011. We are number one for: ‘greenville sc massage therapy’ and number one for: ‘greenville sc massage therapist’.

Funny you should ask about http://www.Greenville-Massage.com as it was one of the first sites I ever optimized a few years ago.

Since February of 2011 I’ve noticed a lot of linkbuilding has been discounted by the latest algorithm. For example up to this point, blog commenting has been powerful, even on no follow blogs, but things are changing.

I’ve also found that blogroll and footer links are discounted more than in 2010. Social media links were discounted in 2010 as well.

In 2011, my preliminary tests show that links in press releases and the pool of syndicated content created in their wake has been discounted.

Some of forum profile links have been devalued, but not all.

I still say links beat out content with Google, it’s their primary influencer, but it’s now more the type of links and what site they are coming from that makes the difference. Link spam has always worked to some extent up till now, but there’s a new Sherrif in town.

Something that bothers me and a lot of individuals and companies, it appears that Google is favoring negative content and keywords, like: criminal, scam, prison and rip-off. A business in France won a law suit against Google on this subject.

http://searchengineland.com/google-loses-french-lawsuit-over-google-suggest-32994

Thanks,
AJ

1. No one is interested
2. You have something new that no one has ever heard of and needs to be educated.

Of course on the Google External Keyword Tool, there are settings for an exact match, phrase match and broad match so, one might try all three when analyzing the potential. Otherwise, one can do one of two things:

1. Piggyback traffic from a hot trending topic and you slip in your content with it. It works because tons of people are searching for the hot topic, so if you rank well for it, you’ll expose a related audience.

2. Build an audience over time with blogging, video marketing, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If one is passionate about their subject, you’ll get a team of followers that will crow about what you do as well.

Kick Some Butt,
Glen

By the way, what is an EM?

I agree that .com would be the ideal extension but to choose a keyword phrase that receives no searches would nullify the use of a .com or .net etc.

I have been working very closely with choosing ideal EMD’s and the first thing I want to be sure of is that enough people are actually putting my keywords into google.

E.g.

I thought my snowboarding website was a perfect EMD but a more experienced AM hit me with the disappointing news that ‘snowboarding freestyle’ was only being entered 480 times a month instead of over 20,000 that I actually believed. Although I should have suspected something because my traffic was very low.

The problem lies in the google keyword tool which automatically returns the very high broad figures for keyword searches and by activating the [exact] and “phrase” match types along with broad, a more realistic report comes back.

I do realise with time and good seo work, the site will begin to access the broader market but as getting traffic is the name of the game, we have to ensure the [exact] match is relatively substantial.

What are your thoughts on this?

I think it’s branding vs search engine optimization. When you go for a domain name which is your own unique name, then I don’t think it really matters what domain name extension you use as long as you’re not competing with a bunch of others for the same name. For example, one of my clients is named Carolyn Johnson, a fairly common name, yet when we went to buy CarolynJohnson.com, it was sold and being used by a photographer. We asked if she’d be interested in selling and since she used it for her business, she passed on the opportunity understandably. Therefore, we just had to do a little extra SEO to get http://www.Carolyn-Johnson.com to the top of a search for: Carolyn Johnson. It would have been easier to get to the top with carolynjohnson.com with no hyphen.

Doing a search for: Somersault Group, I see your site: http://www.somersaultgroup.com/, comes up number one on a Google search. That was easy because no one else in the whole world is competing for the two word phrase: somersault group. However, if you were going for just: somersault, then you’d have a bit more of a challenge if you couldn’t get somersault.com, .org or .net. So, for unique branding searches, you’re fine in your current strategy.

When going for organic searches for the keywords in the content you’ll have on your website, everything changes. If no one has ever heard of your company, then no one is searching for it unless you handed them your business card with your url on it. Therefore, the organic searches for the content on your SomersaultGroup.com site would be for keywords like: ‘digital publishing’ or ‘future of digital publishing’. It would be easier if you had bought domain names, like: DigitalPublishing.com if you want to come up number one in search for that keyword phrase. What should you do? If you go for branding, then just realize, you’ll have to do more link building and online promotion to get the word out about your site, but once they have become familiar with your site, Somersault Group is catchy and memorable. That’s where branding is powerful. If you have a unique branding name, then it really doesn’t matter as much if the domain name ends in .it or .com. It will be easy for your to come up number one in a search for: ‘somersault group’.

For a real world example, take GoDaddy.com. To be sure, Go Daddy is a branding name, because if you had never heard of Go Daddy and you needed to buy a domain name, you’d never do a search for ‘Go Daddy’, you’d search for: ‘buy a domain name’ or ‘domain name seller’. So, Bob Parson’s with his love for swing music, decided to brand his domain name business after one of his passions. It would have had more natural search traffic in the early stages if he had purchased: DomainNames.com or something similar. Bob went with a branding phrase, therefore he had to do more marketing to get his company well known. If you are as commited as Bob Parson’s was, then you’ll be fine with a branding domain name.

Another solution is to go for SomersaultGroup.com, then do secondary sites with links to the SomersaultGroup.com site. In other words, put up other support sites using keyword phases in the domain name (DigitalPublishingTrends.com), but do Squidoo lenses and Hub Pages and YouTube videos with the titles baring the generic keywords while putting links on those pages linking to SomersaultGroup.com. SomersaultGroup.it or Somersault.it would be fine in this case.

Hope This Helps, Glen

You are so welcome!

If your http:// and your http://www both go to http://, then you are fine. I think your thought of brevity is valid as long as they both go to the same url. Some of the biggest urls out their go to just the http:// variety. In fact, you might have heard of it: http://twitter.com. So, you are good to go!

However, if it’s business I usually go with the one that rolls off the tongue for the memorable branding power; however, for the best SEO results, I’d use the Google External Keyword Tool to analyze the searches per month. You will get better search results if you go with exactly what people are searching for in spite of my branding url preference. Even with this tool, often the result of a GothamWidget.com / WidgetGotham.com analysis, the numbers are the same. If not, then go for the one that gets more searches.

For a massage therapist in Greenville, SC, I tried to buy http://www.greenvillemassage.com, but they wanted $1,200 for it, so I went with http://www.greenville-massage.com for $8. If you do a Google search, it will likely come up number one for ‘greenville massage’ and number 2 for ‘massage greenville’. Bare in mind, I did zero backlinks for ‘massage greenville’. A special note: due to the poor economy, 3 years later, they were willing ot sell http://www.greenvillemassage.com for $300 so I bought it and have started a new site, but I haven’t really done any offsite SEO. However, it is on page one.

Recently, a wonderful client named Carolyn Johnson want a personal blog, yet CarolynJohnson.com was taken by a photographer and she was unwilling to sell, so I bought http://www.Carolyn-Johnson.com. With a little SEO, our brand new site now beats CarolynJohnson.com. Try a Google search for ‘carolyn johnson’ to see. I’m not a fan of the dash, but it seems like Google doesn’t penalyze you for it like I think they used to in 2008.

Because of your great question I just built about 20 links to your http://www.AscendWell.com site and I submitted your RSS & Atom feeds to about 50 RSS directories using http://www.ascendwell.com/feed/ and your Atom feed as well http://ascendwell.com/feed/atom/. Some the links I made for you are similar to this: http://esitestats.com/ascendwell.com

One suggestion I’d make is to redirect your url path for your home page to go only one url. Currently, http://ascendwell.com and http://www.ascendwell.com go to two different places; therefore linking efforts can possibly be diluted. Whichever one you have used to build links, I’d go with it as the primary path. But for new sites, I always set everything as such: http://www.ascendwell.com. Since this is a WordPress site, you can remedy this in 3 minutes by signing in to your dashboard, then in the left margin, click on the settings tab, then the general tab. You’ll see two fields: 1. WordPress address (URL) 2. Site address (URL). These are found right below the Title and Tagline forms at the top of the page. I’d set both of them to: http://www.ascendwell.com, then save the page. This will boot you out to the login page, but simply log back in using your same name and password. Viola, everything will now go to the http://www.ascendwell.com url. The problem is not as big as it used to be but why not go for the best?

Always on Your Side, Glen

*Interesting note: All urls are in English right now, but I believe that will change one day.

Great question.

larry

I can’t find anyone or tool to speak to this. What should I get WidgetGotham.com or GothamWidget.com.
I have asked 20 people and it went 10/10. I ran a poll on another of my sites & it was 75/30 was widgetlocation.

Thanks for the help & you have a great & useful site!

I’m at http://AscendWell.com & looking to specialize a few of the pages.
Namaste,
Jason

Thanks Glen.

I’ve also found throw-away words are a good alternative. For example, if you can’t get LawnMower.com, then go for TheLawnMower.com. It’s not as good as the first, but I’ve seen the latter perform quite well.

Glen