101 Articles Domain Names & Keywords in URL's
DOMAIN NAMES AND KEYWORDS IN URLs
Domain Name:
Domain names are the hostnames for identifying and locating internet resources such as websites.Individual systems such as host systems make use of domain names as hostnames. Hostnames are leaf labels in the DNS without further subordinates and they appear as a component of Uniform Resource Locators (URL's) for websites.
Keywords:
The fate of a website depends upon the traffic it derives. Web users search for information or products with the help of search engines. The key to provide or find this information relies on the search text of phrase they input to the search engines.
This text is essentially treated as a keyword and based upon that, the sites containing these keywords will be listed as per their rank in decreasing order.For a site's success during initial stage, one needs to define a unique domain name as well as choose a set of target keywords that makes the website unique from other websites providing similar services to millions of web users.
Domain name and keywords in URL's as search engine optimization?
Commonly every web user will obviously look at only the first few top 10 sites displayed in the result set pertaining to the search text or phrase. Only if they are unsatisfied they will look into the second 10. Having a domain name with keywords make the website unique and survive amidst competitors which helps in improving their rankings. Keywords in URLs or in domain names have been a factor in search engine rankings for a long time. Even today search engines like keywords in domain name or URLs.
As a result domain names with keywords in URL's have also been exploited extremely. These spammers were owners of websites that were named in the format such as keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com. Combined with other strategies employed, this became a deadly weapon to influence and maximize the benefits, thus manipulating search engines in every possible aspect to rank their websites higher and be listed among the top few websites of a result set.
Search engines became pretty aware of such practices and started penalizing the websites having more than 3 keywords in their domain name.
Though the penalty is not major, still any domains which have more keywords in URLs will raise a red flag with search engines. Choosing a domain name that is similar to another major website may work to attract web users and derive traffic when they type the wrong address.
If you are a fresher creating a website for yourself, it is advisable to stuff some keywords that makes your website unique for ranking benefits, but see to that you do not use more than two or three keywords along with hyphens in your domain name, as the end result will affect your site badly. Having product or service names in URLs are ok as long as they are not exploited with long URls. Don't have URls like
www.yourdomain.com/search-engin-optimization-promotion-ranking-marketing-service.htmlRather we can have
www.yourdomain.com/SEO.html or www.yourdomain.com/search-engine-optimization.htmlOnly recently Google brought an update which reduced the value of pages/sites that use excessive keywords in domain names and URLs. But sites that use keywords properly in their URLs are not penalized. It is important to make sure we play within search engine guidelines and still rank high and get necessary traffic.
 |
Images |
The above image is an example of a site which has keywords in its domain name. This manipulation is done in order to increase the ranking in search engines.
 |
Screen Shots |
 |
Graph |
The graph in the image shows the use of keywords in domain names for high rankings over the past 10 years. It is noted that spammers have uses this tactic from the years 2002 to 2008, after which the algorithm update for Google recognized this tactic and henceforth there was a decrease in the use of many keywords in domain names.
 |
Flash/ interactive stuffs |
 |
References |
 |
Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |