Slight keyword variation domain name
-
I have recently changed a clients domain name from a long (23 characters) to a shorter domain name that has a keyword plus a single character variation. For example and without revealing the clients real domain name, let say they are in housing. Ithe first letter in the company name is "p" so i created the doamin name as www.phousing.com It has only been two days since i submitted the new domain name and did a 301 redirect to the new page. When i do a google search i get back the result: housing.com and "did you mean housing.com Will this domain name cause me problems? Any input is greatly appreciated!
-
"...by the time you told someone the address you where exhausted and the prospect was confused"
Best answer I ever heard!
-
Thank you Cyrus! To answer the question of why I changed their domain name in the first place,
- Original domain name had no relevance to the services they provide
- The domain name was 23 characters long, which I feel is way too long and allows for 23 opportunities for a client to misspell the name when writing emails, accessing the website, ect....
- The domain name was 7 syllables....by the time you told someone the address you where exhausted and the prospect was confused
- They had virtually no web presence, so the switch was simple enough. They had literally one link. The site was under 10 pages, so again, not a huge undertaking.
Again, thank you so much for the feedback. SEOmoz really has a great community!
-
Howdy,
Hmmmm... I have to wonder why you changed the domain name in the first place? There are certainly many legitimate reasons to do so, but it's a pretty drastic measure to do a domain migration and most of the time it's something most webmasters want to avoid unless they have to.
If the domain is close to a popular domain, you may continually run into the problem of Google trying to correct your spelling when folks search for your brand name - especially if the brand doesn't have a lot of visibility.
For example, if I registered the name mfacebook.com, Google would likely try to steer me towards Facebook time and time again (not to mention Facebook hitting me with Trademark issues
Will the domain name hurt your SEO? Probably not anymore than the normal risks involved with migrating a website to a new domain.
The bigger question that I think you want to address is: will Google recognize the keyword in the domain? Although Google does a pretty good job at discecting domain names (for example, they know that bluewidgets.com is "blue widgets") the algorythm isn't perfect. SEOmoz.org is a perfect example. For years Google didn't give us credit for the keyword "SEO" because "moz" wasn't a common word. So instead, we were clumped together in the "SEOmoz" (single word) category.
My best advice, if you want to take advantage of keywords in the URL for an existing domain, is to use them sparingly in subdirctories and file names, such as example.com/keyword.
Regardless, keep us up to date on your progress. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Thank you very much for your response. I actually changed their domain name again just to avoid potential issues. I find myself frequently these days having to base domain and website development decisions on the fact that i am afraid google will penalize my sites. I mean there are legitimate whitehat methods that are in my clients best interests, but because an unethical person may use a method that is similiar for black hat purposes. Google is penalizing the good guys for the sake of restricting some bad guuys. For example i guess some people trying to trick the engines by putting a single character variable in a popular keyword name, but my clients case they wanted their companies first initial plus industry. They or i am not trying to "trick" the engines, it just made sense for them , but now i have to select an inferior domain name....
-
Hi
Your site is recently registered, whilst the other site with a very similar domain name is old then your site, the likelihood is that users are searching for that one rather than your new one, hence the occasional auto-correct. Given a bit of time this should resolve itself
Wait for some time & you will find your domain name.
Hope this helps.
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
-
What is the relationship between inbound links and linking domains?
In doing competitor research, there's a specific competitor that has fewer linking domains, but dramatically more inbound links. How do these two relate to each other? I do have a higher domain authority and more internal followed links with them having more internal nofollow and external (both follow and nofollow) links. I'm trying to understand how they can have 3.7k linking domains and 4.8 million inbound links while I have 4.1k linking domains and only 601k inbound links. What really defines an inbound link and what's there relationship between inbound links and linking domains?
Competitive Research | | grayloon0 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
How much keyword density for Google?
I have several pages on one site which have gone down during the past few months. They keyword density on those pages, which is not unnatural, pleased Google for many years. it still pleases Bing. But Google now seems very picky. Based upon your experience, what is the ideal % keyword density for 2 and 3 word phrases, and should they be left out of alt tags even when proper to put them there? While Google dominates, we do not wish to alienate BIng/Yahoo. It is a huge mystery, and experimentation with more non-keyword-related text has so far not born any fruit. Thank you, GH
Competitive Research | | gheh20130 -
Ranking for long tailed keyword vs shorter keyword phrase?
I have a webpage http://freightmonster.com/free-freight-quote that currently ranks 19th in the Google SERP's for the keyword free freight quote. The keyword gets 59 exact match searches a month. Competition is high for this keyword. The keyword freight quote gets 8625 exact match searches a month and my home page http://freightmonster.com/ ranks 26th in the Google SERP for it. Competition is high for this keyword. Would I be better off creating another page http://freightmonster.com/freight-quote and doing a better job of on SEO optimization for it in the hopes of getting on page one, or given the fact that freight quote is such a highly competitive term should I just go after other long tailed keywords in my market like flatbed trucking freight quote, heavy haul trucking freight quote, RGN freight quote, etc? We have just started on SEO for organic keywords after spending over $500,000 on PPC in the last 5 years, which in our market niche is the norm. Thank you in advance!
Competitive Research | | FreightBoy0 -
Is it possible to see how many visitors a competitor has received for any given keyword over a set time period?
Is it possible to see how many visitors a competitor has received for any given keyword over a set time period via either Organic / Paid means? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jaycfc1230070 -
Best Way to Consolidate Domains/Rankings After Purchase of Competitor
One of my customers is buying a competitor. The competitor has a site that usually ranks just 1-2 spots below the main site that we manage for them (our site has been up for about a year, and their's is 15-years old). I am wondering what is the best way to consolidate the rankings/websites to take advantage of the purchase of the competitor's web assets. I would love to leave both sites up and just get 2 top-25 links to our products, but with no more marketing being done under the competitor's name, I assume their rankings will degrade. Would a basic 301 re-direct on a page-by-page basis be enough to 'steal' all of the juice their domain name/site has built? Is there some other method of using an older domain to boost the rankings of a newer one (I am assuming they only rank as well as we do because of how long they've been active - all of our metrics are better than theirs across the board). Thanks for any help/advice the community here can provide!
Competitive Research | | dschapira0 -
Fast Question - domain value
For example, If I have a domain: dvdumwandeln.com , and I want to focus in the bellow keywords: dvd umwandeln , dvd in avi umwandeln , and so on... I develop a IA like this: www.dvdumwandeln.com/dvd-in-avi-umwandeln/ . Here the domain will give any value to the keyword dvd in avi umwandeln ( if we have the domain dvdumwandeln.com )? I hope I did explain it well... If I do it, its a good SEO pratice, is this going to really boost my keywords? Thanks for trying to understand my explaination
Competitive Research | | augustos0 -
How to gauge competitiveness on niche keywords
I'm looking to create a website selling a specific niche range of products. For example 'hair extensions.' Using opensite explorer it's fairly easy to guage the competition for similar websites focused on this niche only e.g www.hairextensionsworld.com - I just look at their authority, number of incoming links, anchortext links etc. However, I'm finding it more difficult to guage the competition if a large merchant, for example Amazon, has a page ranking for a specific keyphrase I'm after. Often the large merchant doesn't have a lot of external links to the specific page, but nonetheless it has power from being on the domain of the large merchant. Are there any good tools / metrics for guaging the competition of such pages? Page authority I guess is one? Thanks
Competitive Research | | Nicknak0