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
-
Lost ranking after domain switch
I recently migrated from https://whitefusemedia.com to https://whitefuse.com. The website URL structure and content remained the same and I followed all the best practice guidance regarding checks on the new domain and appropriate 301 redirects. I have seen traffic drop by about 50% and the traffic that is still coming through is mainly coming through links still listed by Google under the old domain (https://whitefusemedia.com). Is this normal? Should I expect to see this bounce back, or is there anything I can do now to regain the rankings?
Technical SEO | | wfm-uk0 -
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.
Technical SEO | | arun.negi0 -
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
Keyword variations on a single page
I have done the research and have compiled a list of a little over 100 keywords that are highly connected to our industry. I have used the metrics to rank those keywords and have given the top 50 of them a ranking. My intention is to use them on my site and make sure that all of my pages have a keyword focus. In doing this, I am running into some challenges. Any insight would be helpful. 1. There are numerous keywords that have simple variations in them. I am trying to figure out if each variation needs it's own page. I have read articles (here on moz) that say that one page can rank for several keywords, and other articles that say that a simple variation can need it's own page. Not sure what to do here. Below is an example of what I mean. (examples: "my long tail keyword" , "my long tail" , "my long" , "long tail" , "long tail keyword" , "keyword long tail") 2. Will it help to create a page for each one of the 50 or even the full 100? I have the opportunity to use blogs and FAQ's to assist with content creation. 3. Since my brand ranks well and is obviously tied highly into my site, do I worry about including brand terms in my keyword focus or should I just focus on those search terms?
Technical SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Umbrella company and multiple domains
I'm really sorry for asking this question yet again. I have searched through previous answers but couldn't see something exactly like this I think. There is a website called example .com. It is a sort of umbrella company for 4 other separate domains within it - 4 separate companies. The Home page of the "umbrella" company website is example.com. It is just an image with no content except navigation on it to direct to the 4 company websites. The other pages of website example.com are the 4 separate companies domains. So on the navigation bar there is : Home page = example.com company1page = company1domain.com company2page= company2domain.com etc. etc. Clicking "home" will take you back to example.com (which is just an image). How bad or good is this structure for SEO? Would you recommend any changes to help them rank better? The "home" page has no authority or links, and neither do 3 out of the 4 other domains. The 4 companies websites are independent in content (although theme is the same). What's bringing them altogether is under this umbrella website - example.com. Thank you
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Checkout on different domain
Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com0