Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Beating a keyword Domain
-
Has anyone here managed to beat a keyword/exact match domain to top spot?
I am currently second and wondering if it is worth the time and effort to knock it off the top spot. How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st?
Any help and advice much appreciated.
-
Keyword domains used to be a lot more powerful than they are right now. Based upon watching a lot of their rankings, I believe that Google turned down their value in early 2011 - shortly after Matt Cutts said that their value would likely be turned down. Maybe they will do that again, I don't know.
I agree that some of these sites rank well with very little content and poor user experience. That generally occurs where competition is rather low in Google or where it is low to moderate in Bing. Where competition is high a domain only makes a fractional contribution to the rankings. So when you see them ranking well for highly competitive terms they are doing the same type of SEO as any other site with poor onsite assets.
-
Thankyou for the reply.
Forgive me if i am a little unsympathetic but time after time i see keyword domains ranking for huge terms but the site itself offers very little in terms of quality content and user experience.
Yes it is annoying to many online search marketers who try very hard and provide natural quality content to be out ranked by a keyword domain because a particular search engine has a bias towards exact match.
No offence but in my opinion the sooner we see keyword domains getting treated the same as any - the sooner we will see a better quality of results.
Forgive me if you are one of the people who produce quality sites on your keyword domain, i respect you if you do.
-
I own several keyword domains. Some of them have top rankings for their exact match query and some of them don't. There is no special formula for beating them. Just compete against them as you would any other domain.
If you ask me the bigger problem is google giving easy top rankings to weak content on ehow, about, wikipedia and other powerful sites.
How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st?
This really seems to bother you. But if you turn that around you would consider them to be a huge asset. So, maybe you should just go out and buy one. Find the guy who owns one and ask "what will it take for you to sell it to me?"... or hire a pro to do that for you. I've done it a few times and am happy with most of the results. They seem to produce a higher conversion rate too.
-
It's one of those domains setup for that keyword only by the looks of it.
The keyword is pretty much their brand term.
-
It really depends on how competitive the keyword is and how strong your competitor is aside from just the exact match aspect. Of course it's possible to beat an exact match domain, and these will probably hold less and less value by Google in the future.
Overall, I would say that fact that it's an exact match domain doesn't change much of anything for me in terms of if it can be outranked. Looking at all the factors holistically is much more important.
-
Social Media presence has been actively influencing the SERPS. I have seen the impact both on local as well as global search. Even if the links from those websites are nofollowed or are not links at all, just URL mentions (or citations) they help. So I would just analyze their backlink profile and get better links. Also, are you outranking them for other keywords, keyword variants and other long tail keywords which are essentially beyond their exact match domain? How is your Domain Strength and Page Strength vs them ?
-
Thankyou for the reply.
One of our big competitors has a huge youtube presence. I alwayus wondered how much of an affect having an active youtube channel can have. What do you think to that?
Thankyou for your advice.
-
Just because the top site is an exact match doesn't mean you can't dislodge them from their #1 spot.
Without knowing all that you have done for your site, the best advice I can give is to look at what they are doing, and then think about other ways to beat them. For the sake of this discussion, let's say that they have a great youtube channel and are very active on twitter. First, you will have to make sure you have a presence on those two sites as well.
Then, you need to take it to the next level - make sure you have a Pinterest, LinkedIn, FB, StumbleUpon, reddit and delicious accounts. Make sure you have the google +1 button on your site and a Google plus page where you link back to your site from.
Simply put, you will have to do more than them in order to take the top spot.
In regards to if it's worth it or not, only you can determine that.
Good luck!
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Do Meta Keywords matter?
I am a firm believer in the fundamentals of SEO but is there any data to support its impact positively or negatively towards a sites rank?
Technical SEO | | Brandonp0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
How to fix keyword cannibalization?
Hello All, I am a webmaster of http://www.bannerbuzz.com and I have some problem in keyword cannibalization in my store, i have lots of categories related to banners, and in Banner section my my keyword is vinyl banners and my all categories urls structure connected with vinyl banners, I am definitely sure that keyword cannibalization issue in my website and i want to resolve it as soon as possible, so can anyone please help me how can i resolve this issue with effective way or without affected my keyword ranking? My Keywords Vinyl Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/full-color-vinyl-banners.html
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Custom Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html
Outdoor Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html My 1 keyword vinyl banners is affected, so can anyone please look at these pages and let me know how can i resolve keyword cannibalization from my website.? Thanks
BannerBuzz.com0 -
How to increase your Domain Authority
Hi Guys, Can someone please provide some pointers on how to best increase your Domain Authority?? Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | GAZ090 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
Delete old site but redirect domain to a new domain and site
I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0