Does a 'Certified Domain' help SEO?
-
I see that GoDaddy offer a 'Certified Domain' option. Does this help SEO at all?
-
Yes, particularly McAfee and Verisign.
This is my belief and not necessarily commonly accepted (yet) amongst the SEO community. I base this belief on a few things:
-
Panda. The questions asked of Panda reviewers were of the type "Would you trust this site with your credit card information". There are studies which clearly demonstrate improved CTR based on the addition of symbols, which tells me these symbols have a positive influence on these decisions. Additionally, the inclusion of these badges are an item which Google can easily track. It is also easy for Google to separate out authentic badges from the many sites who fake it (i.e. show the trust badge image but do not offer the functionality).
-
Security. I sincerely believe sites with McAfee and VeriSign are more secure. I have a client who actually accepted direct credit card payments without SSL on his site. Doing such is a major violation of credit card acceptance, but somehow he managed to do it (prior to hiring me) and he got nailed. Someone hit his site with malware which stole credit card information. He fixed the problem but of course the malware issue impacts rankings.
If I can ever make the time I intend to write an article on this topic as I have done quite a bit of research. In my opinion VeriSign and McAfee's value is significantly higher then other SSL certificates due to their recognition amongst users. Trustwave, GoDaddy and other providers may offer a similar service, but it is very clear to me those badges do not offer the same recognition as do Verisign and McAfee. I just worked with a client who, on my recommendation, turned down a free eCommodo SSL and purchased a Verisign badge for $266. The bottom line is if that Verisign badge yields one extra customer per year, it pays for itself. This particular client sells a $60 product which is purchased monthly and has a high profit margin.
Also McAfee and Verisign (Norton) both have an extension with millions of users each. Users of their AV software will have sites with their trust badges highlighted with their "Seal in Search" feature. Clearly this function is designed to influence CTR and each company provides numbers to show support that conclusion. As far as ranking, I can't say whether Google uses this information as a ranking factor but I know they could and perhaps even should. If I was Google, I would address users with those browser extensions installed by boosting the rankings for sites with the specific seals.
In April of next year the Verisign Seal will change it's name to Norton. If Norton does not do any advertising, this may cause a significant drop in that seal's recognition and value. It's a big unknown at this point.
-
-
Ryan, do you think that a VeriSign, McAfee, Authorize or other "more accepted" "certification seals" might have any influence on rankings?
-
Thanks for the info - I won't bother with it then
I actually use https://www.freeparking.com but I need to create a CNAME record at the sub-sub-domain level (for Windows Azure verification) so I'm looking at other providers who do allow this. I have also read other people comment on GoDaddy's pushy sales tactics. I'll check out NameCheap.
-
GoDaddy's Certified Domain option is a $5 trust badge. A trust badge is valued based on two primary factors: recognition and standards. There are no standards for this badge, anyone can get it. While many people have heard of GoDaddy, I would suggest 99% of people have no awareness of what a "certified domain" is with respect to what GoDaddy offers and the badge has no recognition value.
In short, it's crap. http://www.godaddy.com/domains/certified-domains.aspx
You pay $5 and they verify your WhoIs information. That's it.
Most quality sites which involve ecommerce offer SSL certificates such as VeriSign or McAfee. These certificates are far more recognizable and offer much higher levels of tangible "certification". I wouldn't accept GoDaddy's certification symbol for free. That's just my opinion and others may share a different view.
I have used GoDaddy before but have since switched to NameCheap. GoDaddy's customer service is ok, but they are highly sales oriented with offers (i.e. sending spam e-mails and making their site difficult to use without being overwhelmed by offers) to customers asking them to buy a wide array of completely unnecessary products and services such as this domain certification.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International Targeting | Language > 'fa-ir' - no return tags
I see this error in search console :International Targeting | Language > 'fa-ir' - no return tagsURLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'fa-ir' that do not have return tags.and it is really increasingi do not know what is the problem and what I have done wrong? Originating URL Crawl date Alternate URL 1 /abadan/%D8%A2%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%86/browse/vehicles/?place=8,541&v01=0,1&saveLoc=1 11/16/16 http://divar.ir/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | divar0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Looking for SEO Help- Magento Temporary Redirects
We recently launched a new site (www.CanyonOS.com) on Magento Enterprise. We have run several crawl tests with Moz and keep receiving 302 redirect errors. We've used the admin console for our site to apply 301 redirects in every area that we could but have had no success. (Last audit was completed on August 14) We are receiving 301 redirects on the following types of pages totaling 43k issues 😞 A majority of these issues are when adding and comparing products to the following types of urls. domain.com**/catalog/**product_compare/ domain.com**/wishlist/**index/add/product/ domain.com**/checkout/**cart/add/ Any suggestions from any SEO gurus? Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CanyonOS0 -
Move webshop domain to the brand domain?
Hello, A client of mine has a brand with a website for over 10 years now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
About 4 years ago the have opened a webshop on an other domain (like www.brandnamewebshop.com). At this moment the brand domain has a seomoz authority of 45.
The webshop domain authority is 25. The question:
Would it not be better to transfer the webshop to the brand domain because of the domain authority? If so, how can this be done the best way? With a 301?
I also think: what a loss of energy of building the authority on the other domain.
Is it an idea to use both domains for a webshop and rewrite the content? Or is there an other way to still make use of the built up domain authority? Would it really help the other domain when I make a 301 redirect (and make use of the pointing links to the webshop domain?). I hope somebody have some experience with this...
Looking forward to the possibilities! Gerjan0 -
.gb.net domains good for SEO?
I've found a .gb.net domain with a highly competitive exact match term for sale. Do .gb.net domains rank well within google? Or are they considered not as authorative? Is it worth purchasing one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
SEO - Product Related MiniSites: Hosting & Domains
Hey Mozzers, I would first like to thank everyone in advance for replying to my question 😉 Actually, my question is 2-part: Hosting & Domains 1) We are currently researching product-related domains and would like to build-out review style mini-sites on WordPress that link back to our main site product pages. We're using X-Cart platform and X-Cart offers a WordPress module. My Dev. recommends installing a main WordPress mini-site template on my server and replicating this template under different domains/unique content, obviously ;-). -My questions is; For backlink purposes, would it be better to host these WordPress pages in a different location/server? 2) Domains (which domain extensions are the best): I have read mixed reviews on this subject ... a) Do dashes (i,e. brand-model.com) have an impact as well?? I read a post regarding this; http://www.commonsensemarketing.net/do-domain-name-extensions-matter/ - and the general feeling was that .com and .net ranked higher, faster but that .info wasn't a bad runner up. I was a bit excited to hear that .info wasn't a bad choice as they are actually "available" and cheap as well (under 3 bucks) until a comment was posted about a "Market Samurai" study. They reported testing 4 domain names (below) with the same article, date & time post . 1. domainname.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | k9byron
2. domainname.org
3. domainname.net
4. domain-name.com -My question is: Can anyone give any advise on which domain extensions work better/rank higher faster? com / .net / .org / .info / ect? Also, is it better to have more product related keywords in the domain? Example, one of my products is the "Dogtra 280ncp Platinum". WordStream exact match tells me that "dogtra 280ncp" gets 210 searches per month and that "dogtra 280ncp platinum" gets another 91 searches per month. I'm guessing that its better to buy www.Dogtra280ncpPlatinum.com instead of www.Dogtra280ncp.com as we would pick up the searches for the "platinum" term as well? Question Summary: Is it better to host these mini-sites on another server than my main site? Which domain extensions work better? Is it better to use as many product related keywords in the domain as possible and maybe even throw modifiers in there as well such as "buy" or "review"? Thanks Again!
Byron-0