Let’s say I have two friends. One friend has a habit of buying domain after domain because they are keyword rich. Another friend just emailed me asking if he should dump his current domain name, which he recently purchased and has been building out, for a different domain name that is somewhat keyword rich.
Let’s discuss friend #1. First, he owns a ton of keyword rich domains. Second, they aren’t doing him a lick of good. For one, Google doesn’t put much weight into parked pages. I do, however, have a domain that discredits that statement (maybe). To take Google’s statement one step further though, it would be difficult to drive organic traffic to a parked domain in a highly competitive industry such as real estate and/or mortgage.
I believe my friend’s misconception lies in the accumulation of “websites” in which to point towards the desired domain. All of this effort would be futile since none of these parked domains would carry any weight or relevance.
Now, let’s discuss friend #2. If I understood him correctly, his intentions were to dump the current domain for a domain that was keyword rich. I replied in the email that Yahoo and MSN tend to favor keyword rich domains and that Google was a little bit smarter than that. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be willing to bet that at one time, Google put a little more weight on keyword rich domains, but using a keyword rich domain could be one more way to “game the system”. Especially, if you start buying domains that look like:
- www.domainwithkeyword#1keyword#2keyword#3.com
It would be safe to assume that Google will start to view longer domain names as potentially spammy sites. This is also true if you start throwing in hyphen into the mix. These kinds of domains could possibly be beneficial for PPC campaigns but that would be a discussion for a different time.
So, at the end of the day, my advice to my friends would be to stop buying every keyword rich domain that comes to mind and to stick with the first domain you picked and build out quality content.
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