Close URL owned by competitors.
-
The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered
We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site.
We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it.
We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site.
We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor.
We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site.
My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?
-
Half our domain contains a very prominent keyword for our business. The second half is less so prominent. Few to none would use a search exactly like our domain name to find our services.
Did you ever consider moving your site from www.k-w.com to www.kw.com after you bought it?
This is the second part of my quandary - even if I pay the $24,000 that is being asked for www.kw.com, I still have to consider whether constantly quoting to people 'oh it's www dot keyword hyphen keyword dot com' is worth it, and whether the negatives of having a hyphenated domain outweigh the negatives of losing rankings for ages by moving.
This is moving away from the original question a bit, and though I'd love to discuss this with you further, I understand if you don't have time.
-
Yes, your competitor might do it.
If it is a KW.com it might rank easily for KW queries.
You are building a business on poorly defined turf.
-
Oh, easily. But you do make me think that, if we do continue to growing as we are, if we don't pay for that domain, somebody else might do.
-
heh.... good point.
-
Do you rank number one for your domain with the hyphen in it? Do you want to prevent someone else coming into your market?
-
OK... 12 monthly local searches... not a lot.
Our number was 1000 and that justified paying the ransom. However, a few years ago we would have been at 12 like you. The seller of the domain without the hyphen knew that our traffic was growing and he used that information to ask more.
If I was you, I would buy now if you are building a good site and if you want that domain.
-
Our site does come up in Adwords, but only with 12 monthly local searches. We are also shown in the instant search menu.
I may, like you, have to be held to ransom for the non-hyphenated domain ...
-
If you have a website that people request by name then getting the domain without the hyphens is very important in my opinion.
Our domain was longer than yours. I don't know how many people type our domain in the address bar - that data is not possible to obtain. However, if you use the number of domain queries in google or see if your domain appears in the Adwords Keyword tool then you can get some idea of domain query volume. If google lists your domain in the Adwords keyword tool then you have at least the beginning of a brand and should consider getting rid of that hyphen. The same if your domain shows in the instant search menu.
-
Thanks for your response, I appreciate it Do you think many people still type in longer domains like ours?
I'm finding it really hard to get any data on searching vs typed in domains. I feel like it should be out there but somehow, I'm missing it.
-
We had a k-w.com that was getting over 1000 domain queries per month. The owner of kw.com wanted a ransom for the domain and knew that we were getting some nice traffic because he was getting some of it. We refused to pay for years but finally paid it because the harder we worked the more traffic we lost.
We justified paying for it on the basis of a few lost sales per week over the next several years. Plus getting a domain that was much easier to communicate.
-
As for the traffic: Most people don't manually enter a URL in their browser's adress bar anymore. They usually use Google to find / identify sites of interest. IMHO only a very small minority (tech geeks like me, etc. ) still use their adress bar. Whenever I talk to someone and mention the adress bar they think I was talking about the Google search bar on google.com. So you'd be only losing a small proportion of traffic. I remember that years ago when a company got a new domain they registered it in like 300 different kinds of spelling.. Still: Less than 2 % of total traffic was coming through those sites, as they were never properly advertised nor used. Here in Germany even Google has a problem with that. There's a guy, who owns gmail.de and sent a court order to Googleplex that they may not use gmail.com for German users but that they have to run their service via google.com/mail . I don't suspect Google Mail has gotten a lot les popular by that
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
-
Duplicate home page URL on crawl test
Hi i just recently made a crawl test but before doing that i made sure that i have no more duplicates on my site i am using joomla and as of now i only have 11 links on my site but when my crawl test is done i saw duplicate url of my homepage the duplicate url has a trailing backslash so basically i have all the 11 links + 1 duplicate URL http://mangthomas.com http://mangthomas.com/ can you guys give advise how i can remove the duplicate i dont even know which one to retain. THANKS A LOT, cris
On-Page Optimization | | crisbasma0 -
Numerous duplicate destination URLs from within one menu - potential impact for on-page SEO?
Hello all What is your evaluation in regards to a number of links (different anchors) targeting the same destination URL from within one and the same menu (on the same website)? Keeping it brief: Think of a top menu drop down entry, that needs to feature the alphabet (each letter has it's own sub-entries). However, the actual letter itself is not represented by a page (it has no URL either). So far so good. However, when testing the menu on a mobile device, the letter entries are still treated, as if they were non-existent pages - thus throwing a 404 when clicked. In order to avoid people getting a 404 when clicking on any letter, it would be ideal, if they were directed to any main page (the same destination URL though). However, that would mean 26 times the same destination URL from within that menu. Is this approach potentially bad for SEO, hence there would be numerous duplicate destination URLs in place? Please mind, I am not inquiring for help on how to arrange the actual menu. I am concerned about the impact, identical destination URLs could have on the on-page SEO. Many thanks in advance for your help and input!
On-Page Optimization | | Hermski0 -
I noticed that my company owns a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting them to our homepage?
It turns out we own a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting? (We have owned these sites for a long time, over 15 years.) The keywords are moderate to low in traffic and moderate to high in competitiveness. (Right now they 301 to our main site.) I know exact match is not as valuable as it used to be and that there are mixed opinions about microsites...
On-Page Optimization | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Mixing hyphens and underscores in a url
Hello. I am working on a site that was built with underscores in the urls, but only in the page names, not in the subdirectories. All the subdirectories have one-word names. So a typical url is "example.com/sub1/sub2/page_name." We would like to change the name of one of the subdirectories to a name that would be very useful for SEO, but this new name is a hyphenated word, let's call it "new-sub." If we changed "sub2" to "new-sub" then our url would have a mix of underscores and hyphens: example.com/sub1/new-sub/page_name. But if I used "new_sub" instead, google would read the words as connected with an underscore, instead of reading the subdirectory as a hyphenated word, which would be less useful for SEO. It seems like it might be a problem to have a hyphen in a subdirectory and underscores in the page names. But I want the SEO value of the hyphenated word. Any recommendations? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Prevent Indexing of URLs Based on Tags
I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme. Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have. Is there any reason why this is a problem? I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue? Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me? JiGLH.png
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Canonical URL tags help I am not sure what this is
I am trying to get an A grade on my webpage and this is one of the critical steps canonical URL tags I cant find much information as to what this even is never mind fixing it. Thanks I am a total newbe at this any advice is appreciated
On-Page Optimization | | gemfirez0 -
What is the best practice for changing a url of an existing page
I a looking through the on-page SEO reports in SEOmoz for one of my sites. It suggests that I change the url of a particular page to match the desired search term I want to rank for. In this case it is a site for a local business and the url is example.com/testimonials. when it probabaly should have instead been example.com/city-business-reviews. I have just a couple links to this page and I'm stuck towards the bottom of page 1 in the SERPs currently. Questions... 1. Should I change the url to include the exact keyword term I want the page to rank for? 2. If yes, what is the best method to ensure that any existing link juice to the current url is retained? Would I change the url, then create a new page with the old url and apply a 301 redirect to point it to the new page? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | fastestmanalive0