Domain Names
 

How important is a domain name for SE?
Also is a domain such bla-bla.com as good as blabla.com?
Does the length of the domain name really matter?

Length does matter (har har har) thisismypornsite.com will not be looked on as favourably as pornsite.com.

Also from a word of mouth point of view, the shorter the better.

I am not sure about hyphens with regards to search engines, but I know that most users will type in a site without them faster than they would with. So if someone said to someone in conversation - go to sex-blog.com they would probably go to sexblog.

Thanks, all valid points, but I was looking for something more specific I guess. More from the SE point of view.

A keyworded domain name is a lot less important than it used to be.

The hyphens craze reflected an important pattern in se results a few years back - but that pattern is much reduced, so, all things considered, the value of a hyphened name is reduced as well.

Does the length matter? Not necessarily for se results so much, but for overall branding and linking and the like, I'd say shorter is better.

A shorter, non-hyphenated name is more valuable as an owned property, I'd say.

I done some seo and using domain links like http://www.nochex.com/merchant-account this is at number 1 out of 5,800,000 other sites in google uk for keyword "merchant account" http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...+account&meta=

Yes, but merchantaccountforum.com is 3rd right after a Wikipedia result - not exactly the greatest of examples.

It was the umm unintelligible english that got me wondering..

From - http://www.mattseo.com/seo-consultant/
DD

Back in 1994 I started search engine optimisation before the term SEO was developed.
That was before search engines even existed, but not before proper spelling, you asshole optimization expert!

Matt...or should I say KEVIN!

PS - you're = you are - I don't know anyone that is a main business keyword.

domain name give a little weight on search engine but not that much and referring to your question about bla-bla being the same with blabla is not they are not the same specially if you are targeting the keyword bla bla-bla is much better than blabla.

domain name is one of the factor for search engine spider to rank your website in SERP it may play a little factor but it is still count.

WOW

insightful thread |huh

mattseo = cluess spammer?

TBPR doesn't necessarily say a whole lot but an SEO site with a TBPR 2 and 207 bottom-rung backlinks and not a single link from another SEO site = zero credibility, zero visibility. 9 results for site:/* search for a 1k+ page site = no domain authority.

Why create a "1000 visitors" category? Is that a lucrative query I'm missing out on?

No professional SEO uses TITLE text in links.

And links like "http://www.mattseo.com/wp-content/plugins/...
obsocialbookmarker/include/obsocialbookmarker_redirect.php?...
site=obsocialbookmarkerblinklist&...
link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattseo.com%2...
Fseo-consultant%2F&title=SEO+Consultant+-+UK+Yorkshire" creates noise. Especially when your link profile is thin you only want to link to your strongest pages, else nofollow. You ever wonder why you got 5,790 crawlable pages and almost none of them are in Google's main index?

Last but not least, /robots.txt redirects to /robots.txt/...

Matt, maybe you should be paying other people for SEO advice?

As for keywords in domain names, choose whatever sounds good, unless you're spamming, in which case avoid too many dashes.

I prefer a domain without hyphen. It's easy to remember!