Outranking a competitor when their domain name is the keyword
-
Hi I'd just like to ask the opinion of my fellow members here :
We are currently ranking second for a very important keyword and would obviously like the top spot on the SERP - the site that is ranking first has the domain name as the keyword phrase(along with a good amount of quality links from a variety of domains) - now I know it is possible to outrank them since I do remember reading about this in one of Rands posts(I think it was the whole white hat black hat one he posted recently) - bascially we have more domain authority, slightly less links but from double the amount of root domains and a higher page authority too!
Does having the keyword as your domain make THAT much of a difference when we are(imo) quite close in terms of great content and link profiles(and all the onpage factors) ?
Thanks!
-
Perhaps not THE deciding factor - and yes I agree that the backlinks are perhaps of a higher strength/quality - but surely the domain name still plays SOME part in the overall ranking of the site? Or is this something that used to be effective and that's why people bought up domain names that matched their highest traffic keywords?
-
IMO, it can't be a deciding factor. I believe the site has higher number of quality backlinks than you do.
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
-
Changed domains, saw significant drop in domain authority
Hello, A little over a month ago we switched our domain from A to B. The original was .com and the new one is at a .tech for good measure. We have meticulously done 301 redirects page by page but there has been a massive drop in traffic and I checked here to see that we've gone from a 30 domain authority to a 9. The company is a few months over 1 year old, but we're really looking at traffic accumulated in just about 8 months for the old domain. Is there any way to recover some of the old juice in this one other than the re-directs? Our number of backlinks have also severely dropped despite re-directs.
Technical SEO | | SteveSaf0 -
Pages Fighting Over Keywords
Hi Guys, Just after some general advice. Since manipulation of keywords through links is no longer a feasible way of ranking these days, I was wondering how people got round the issue of pages bouncing for the same keyword or Google deciding that a blog post is a better signal rather than your service page. For instance if you are doing local and national search, how do you stop the local keywords ranking for national pages, without diluting the local signals. I have some ideas:- stronger internal linking to the page review content But obviously redirects or canonical won't be a good solution as I still want these pages to exist in their own right. Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
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 -
New keyword simply not Ranking
Evening all, first post. I'm currently ranking OK for a broad range of keywords - nothing at number 1 but some are on the first page. However, there is one particular keyword which simply refuses to get indexed. I've witnessed this behaviour before with another site where it appears at SERP 300 or so, then vanishes, comes back at 200 odd and then vanishes. Right now, it's not even ranking in any position. I'm using SERPFox for SERP position on Google. I've had Moz analyse the content on page and it's getting an A. The article is about 2000 words, with good Title and page description and the keyword is appearing under 1%. My question is, have you witnessed odd behaviour like this before where other keywords are ranking OK but an odd few don't even get indexed? I have a few links built to the URL and asked Google Webmaster tools to index the URL but still nothing. I have no penalties or anything to worry about. The only other info I have is that this URL is on a brand-new domain but the previous domain has a 301 redirect with a page authority of 42 and a domain authority of 38 (not too high). And, everything else appears to be running along OK. The point is, I have no expectations about the keyword ranking in a certain position but find it odd how the keyword keeps popping in and out of Google SERP. The keyword has a difficulty of: 58% Any thoughts appreciated. Robert. uH7vtbh
Technical SEO | | hooneyrobert0 -
File name same as folder name, ok?
Is it ok to have a folder and file name to be both the same e.g domain.com/xyz-products/ domain.com/xyz-products.php File name would be a page that lists a number of products and then within the folder there would be x-product.php, y-product.php etc
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
Migrating a better performing domain to a less well performing domain
I have a customer who has many domain names and assets but she's wanting to consolidate some of them to help her simplify things for her customers but mostly she wants to build up her website through which she sells products. Grief Reflection - www.griefreflection.com is a personal journal that she's keeping to process the impending death of her husband and it's also linked to her business website which sells healing from grief types of products. Storybooks for Healing - www.storybooksforhealing.com is the website through which she sells workbooks and memory books for people who want to keep the memory of their loved one alive after they've gone. I've setup both of these domains as campaigns and have been looking at the metrics for both. The grief reflection blog out performs the storybooks for healing website. If we merge the two then the Grief Reflection blog would likely become a subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com and be more fully integrated which she thinks will help her visitors not get confused while navigating her website. www.griefreflection.com has 12,637 links while www.storybooksforhealing.com has 1,462. Also, Google has indexed 380 pages of Grief Reflection and only 100 pages for Storybooks for Healing, though that may be because there are fewer pages to index. Grief reflection also has a 4.36 mozRank and 5.30 mozTrust, where Storybooks has 4.13 mozRank and 5.15 mozTrust. Should I counsel her to keep these domains separate? If not, would simply setting up 301 redirects from the www.griefreflection.com domain name to the new subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com be the way to go? Thank you ever so much for any wisdom anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | ChristiMc0 -
Hyphenated Domain Names - "Spammy" or Not?
Some say hyphenated domain names are "spammy". I have also noticed that Moz's On Page Keyword Tool does NOT recognize keywords in a non-hyphenated domain name. So one would assume neither do the bots. I noticed obviously misleading words like car in carnival or spa in space or spatula, etc embedded in domain names and pondered the effect. I took it a step further with non-hyphenated domain names. I experimented by selecting totally random three or four letter blocks - Example: randomfactgenerator.net - rand omf act gene rator Each one of those clips returns copious results AND the On-Page Report Card does not credit the domain name as containing "random facts" as keywords**,** whereas www.business-sales-sarasota.com does get credit for "business sales sarasota" in the URL. This seems an obvious situation - unhyphenated domains can scramble the keywords and confuse the bots, as they search all possible combinations. YES - I know the content should carry it but - I do not believe domain names are irrelevant, as many say. I don't believe that hyphenated domain names are not more efficient than non hyphenated ones - as long as you don't overdo it. I have also seen where a weak site in an easy market will quickly top the list because the hyphenated domain name matches the search term - I have done it (in my pre Seo Moz days) with ft-myers-auto-air.com. I built the site in a couple of days and in a couple weeks it was on page one. Any thoughts on this?
Technical SEO | | dcmike0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0
