How much does a good domain help?

[tke1600]

How much does it help to have the domain "poker.com" compared to "bestpokerplayinfo.com" if you were to work just as hard on building content, links, etc. How much better is it to have a good domain name like poker.com or onlinepoker.com?

tke1600

[Georgia Poker]

IMO, name means nothing. It's how you brand it, build it, promote it, and maintain it.

If you going to do a big name like playwinningpokeronline, buy play-winning-poker-online. That way the SE's will see it as play winning poker online, vs. one big ass word...

[Jay]

poker.com is good because it is a typein. As in, people are going to sit down at their computer and type poker.com into their browser.

But nobody is ever going to type in bestpokerplayinfo.com. That's the advantages of one words or short phrases, and that's why a lot of people don't like names with hyphens.

It really doesn't matter all that much if you are planning on developing your site since you are going to be advertising, word of mouth, link exchanges and hopefully getting into the search engines.

[PPP]

poker.com is an exceptional example, as exact match for search queries is valued extremely highly.

Good domain names help in many ways, but given the fact that you can't just go out and register poker.com, just get a sensible domain name and build a good quality site.

[Jay]

Originally posted by PPP@Jan 23 2006, 10:36 PM
poker.com is an exceptional example, as exact match for search queries is valued extremely highly.

No, it's not. It's valued really high because it would get type-ins without any work or effort on behalf of the domain name owner.

That's why when you search for sex, sex.com doesn't appear on the first page of results on Google or Yahoo. Regardless, they are getting tons and tons of traffic from people typing sex.com at their browser.

[John D]

Another site I’m a member on is doing a test to see if the domain name helps with search rankings, I think it really does help a lot.

I bought a domain last year for $800 because it's easier to remember than most and because of the words, I think it will get a lot higher in se results.

Name is very important, its a lot easier to brand a one or two word domain that catchy than say a four word domain or any domain with hyphens.

Having hyphens isn't a good idea at all if your going for type-ins.

I think if two domains had the exact same content, exact same back links, same SEO performed etc. the one with the words searched in the SE will get higher ranking over the other.
That's exactly the experiment being done on another site I go to and I think it will happen.

Another thing is people sometimes type the word in the domain field in their browser and don’t enter an ext, most browsers will then look for that words they entered with the ext. starting from .com, then .net and I think most try .org - I think that also counts as a type-in.

[HT0]

Originally posted by Jay+Jan 24 2006, 07:19 AM-->

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