Hey everyone.
First post on here so go easy :-)
Just wondering what people's thoughts are about the new TLDs that ICANN are supposedly going to roll out in 2012 and how (if at all) they will affect the SEO power that exact match .co.uk and .org.uk domains currently hold in Google.co.uk.
http://domainnamewire.com/2011/01/27/new-tld-guidebook-may-be-approved-in-march-after-all/
I'd also be interested in hearing people's thoughts more generally on exact match domains and whether their SEO power can last regardless of ICANN. Seems to me to be a growing swell of opinion - just from reading around - that Google might take away some of their SEO power in the near future because of thin affiliate sites "gaming" the SERPS.
Cheers,
Ed
Hi edo
Come on guys and girls say hi:)
My personal view is they always give and edge as easier to get anchor text links too.
Doug
Hi edo
IMO they will do what they always do - a very small tweak in that direction, but not enough to change things too much.
I think their whole algo is a precarious house of cards these days - any major changes cause more trouble than the problem the changes are supposed to address.
If a 'normal Joe' was to read every algo improvement that Matt Cutts had 'announced' to the world, he would assume that spamming Google with crappy low-content affiliate site was impossible now... but as we know, it ain't.
Someone more cynical than I might assume that there was some connection between this and the widely held belief that each improvement in SERPs reduces their Adwords revenue a little.
Hi edo, welcome to th3 Core!
I'll echo what the others said; it has a slight advantage over a non-match domain, but I'm sure is more a matter of the inbound links having the exact phrase in the anchors more than an actual boost in the algo. It's simply easier to get links with exact matching phrases. Personally in some cases I find exact domains to be more trustworthy.
But it's actually an interesting question if the new tlds will decrease the value of the old exact match domains.
I'll take an exact match any day of the week.
Cough: http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/the-official-introduction-thread/ ;)
Welcome,
In virtually all cases, if the exact match is available, I'll pay a premium for it. Unless the domain would end up looking terribly spammy all by itself.
I rattled off a few fairly generic thoughts on this a couple of years back
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/2585-how-the-new-tlds-could-impact-your-search-rankings
Still stand by the http://car.insurance example. I'd image a great CTR from SERPs for such domains once the general public have learnt that the .com/.co.uk isn't actually missing.
Thanks for all your thoughts. Especially liked your article, Adam. I'm with everyone in rating exact-match domains, but I'm not a believer in blindly expecting their dominance in the SERPS to continue for ever. Then again I thought that way in 2001 when I didn't bother renewing names like Pornos.co.uk, Headphones.co.uk, Croatia.co.uk and others. Doh!
That is a doh......
Doug
We launched an exact match domain a few weeks ago and it went #10, #8 and now #4 for the exact match query. Not highly competitive, but still in a niche where people are knowing what they are doing - we have quite a few UK sites competing in this niche in our local language.
As a side note, the domain is a local language version with a local character (ø) in the name. We have steered away from those domains for a long time as our local chars only work here (øæå etc) and search engines historically have had problems with these chars.
We build the site anyway on this domain for a test and linked to it with the ø char in the html and bingo it went top 10 right away. The html (Wordpress) spits out the encoded version (ex: www.xn--phraserjer3jb...) in the internal links, but it's not a problem so far.
However I've seen Google show both the real URL in the serp but also the encoded one. It seems to have settled on the non-encoded real one though.
those xn domains are interesting. Looked into this in a little a year or so ago.
I've seen google returning them just fine. Would imagine they will pick up in popularity over coming years in the relevant local markets. I understand IE used to have a problem with them but have bolted on (or will soon) some tech now that renders them properly.
keyword rich's work really well.....
Doug