Picking Domain Names Question

[BXS Eire]

Hi guys

How powerful is the domain name with regard to Search Engine results? Is it better than keywords and tags or just the same to the engine?

Also, with popular topics, the good domain names are nearly always not available. Is google tolerant of different (wrong) spelling of a title. Say for example I want Recipes.com but that is gone so I do Recipees.com or Resipes.com . Does anybody know if there is a tolerance for substituting phonetically similar letters?

Thanks a lot

Brian

[Nik]

I think the tolerance goes in the other direction. If a searcher types in the phonetic miss spelling google shows the search results for "recipes" instead because they know it's most likely a miss spelling. But if your site becomes an authority and gets searched enough times google should eventually realize that people are really looking for your site when they miss spell the words.

Nik

[Jack]

But I suspect that Google would rank a site that is misspelled for the correct spelled search (provided the other seo factors are in place) simply because Google understands what the intention of the misspelled word is.

I don't remember who it was now. But someone on this forum got a misspelling domain name for the product Affiliate Millionaire and ranked pretty well with it. I believe it was affiliatemilionaire.com if I'm not mistaken.

Jack

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That said, personally I don't think I would take a misspelled domain name. I would go for the hyphenated version before I would do that.

[BXS Eire]

(01-13-2011 04:44 PM)niktodorov Wrote:  I think the tolerance goes in the other direction. If a searcher types in the phonetic miss spelling google shows the search results for "recipes" instead because they know it's most likely a miss spelling. But if your site becomes an authority and gets searched enough times google should eventually realize that people are really looking for your site when they miss spell the words.

Nik

Thanks Nik. I wouldn't be relying on people spelling the word incorrectly to get my site up. I am just thinking that if a search is run for "Recipes", if I have enough optimisation done, will Google include "Recipees" as a high ranker. I know it needs a hundred other factors included for optimisation, but I wonder if Google would include the similarly spelled word.

I suppose my first question is the more important one though (to me!). Does Google give any preference to domain names that are the same or very close to the keyword or phrase that is being searched.

Thanks
Brian

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(01-13-2011 04:57 PM)PartainSr Wrote:  But I suspect that Google would rank a site that is misspelled for the correct spelled search (provided the other seo factors are in place) simply because Google understands what the intention of the misspelled word is.

I don't remember who it was now. But someone on this forum got a misspelling domain name for the product Affiliate Millionaire and ranked pretty well with it. I believe it was affiliatemilionaire.com if I'm not mistaken.

Jack

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That said, personally I don't think I would take a misspelled domain name. I would go for the hyphenated version before I would do that.

Thanks Jack. Hypenated versions... good point. I didn't think of it that way. But that example you gave for affiliatemillionaire.com is an example of what I wanted to do. Just a slight difference in spelling - I'm not doing anything with recipes, but it was just a word that came to mind!!

OK, back to the drawing board. : )
Nice day to you all.
Brian

[Jack]

Yeah, I guess the first question was not really answered.

The answer is that currently the domain name is much more powerful than any other on page seo factor by far. I've seen it many times. For a search term that is not very competitive, a site can rank on the first page with no content, no backlinks, no seo at all other than the keyword domain.

[Nik]

(01-13-2011 04:57 PM)PartainSr Wrote:  But I suspect that Google would rank a site that is misspelled for the correct spelled search (provided the other seo factors are in place) simply because Google understands what the intention of the misspelled word is.

(01-13-2011 05:51 PM)BXS Eire Wrote:  I suppose my first question is the more important one though (to me!). Does Google give any preference to domain names that are the same or very close to the keyword or phrase that is being searched.

Yeah, as long as your website is optimized for the keyword it wouldn't matter that the domain is miss spelled, even if it's totally different word in the domain I don't think it would matter.

But as for the domain name to have any seo value, i don't think it will be the case. The reason i think this is that even when you type a misspelled word in google, google displays the results for the correct spelling by default. If google things the misspelled word is correct as well, they should be able to make an association between the two, and have some seo value.

An example to illustrate this would be if you type in "hq" in google, google also highlights the word "headquarters" in the results. This is because google has made an association between the these words. So in this case I think if you have the domain name "corporatehq.com" it would pose a very good seo benefit in ranking for the keyword "corporate headquarters" because google has made an association between hq and headquarters.

(01-13-2011 04:57 PM)PartainSr Wrote:  I don't remember who it was now. But someone on this forum got a misspelling domain name for the product Affiliate Millionaire and ranked pretty well with it. I believe it was affiliatemilionaire.com if I'm not mistaken.

I think it was Thomas that had the affiliatemilionaire.com domain. However I don't remember ever seeing his website on the first page for the word "affiliate millionaire", even though he had a sale or two.

[intmktr]

I wouldn't misspell it. I'd rather add another word or abbreviation to it. Adding hq to the end is popular. I've done it on some of my domains with good results.

[Silla]

(01-20-2011 04:14 AM)intmktr Wrote:  Adding hq to the end is popular. I've done it on some of my domains with good results.

Thanks for this tip! Now I finally have a 2-letter suffix I can use It's terrible to see how much the keyword density lowers in Market Samurai with each extra letter in the domain name.

[BXS Eire]

Yep - HQ is a good idea. I was toying around with other prefixes and suffixes but short and sweet is the essence of a domain name.
Thanks