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
-
Product Subdomain Outranking "Marketing" Domains
Hello, Moz community! I have been puzzling about what to do for a client. Here is the challenge. The client's "product"/welcome page lives at www.client.com this page allows the visitor to select the country/informational site they want OR to login to their subdomain/install of the product. Google is choosing this www.client.com url as the main result for client brand searches. In a perfect world, for searchers in the US, we would get served the client's US version of the information/marketing site which lives at https://client.com/us, and so on for other country level content (also living in a directory for that country) It's a brand new client, we've done geo-targeting within the search console, and I'm kind of scared to rock the boat by de-indexing this www.client.com welcome screen. Any thoughts, ideas, potential solutions are so appreciated. THANKS! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
I want to shift my website to a new domain name, with my brand name. Would Lose rankings
hi, Currently i have a 18 year old domain name "www.jaipurdentists.com". I wish to shift to a new domain name "www.thaperdental.com". primarily because of two reasons: 1. I have a same name competitor with domain "www.thaperdentalclinic.com", the site gets benefited because of the brand name domain. 2. The new domain name "www.thaperdental.com" is better to remember and pronounce. Even if I redirect all web-pages, properly to the corresponding web-pages on new site. Should I go ahead with this? will it result in drop in rankings!
Technical SEO | | StutiTh1 -
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 -
Goals for Sub Domain
I have created separate account for my sub domain and created goal for that, we have sales force data base to capture the leads.The problem which i'am facing is comparing to the goals and Sales force leads is very much difference.Goals leads are showing huge than sales force leads. 2) When lead is creating from organic source but in goals it's showing referral lead.
Technical SEO | | Anshul.S0 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
Keyword rich domain name and page title
Hi guys, First of all, I must say I love this community, and that SEO is great and at time fascinating :d Ok my question now is, I have this domain which is keyword rich, later I noticed Google changed my pages title into something else but similar, also added my domain name (mysite.com) in the titles. Google had taken some of his auto-title-suggestions from inside my pages, later i changed them and saw google changed the titles too accordingly, nice work google ) So I figured this tile name changing is because my domain is already keyword rich, right? so the best practice is, I create a more unique descriptive title + my domain name at the end of the title. (And for homepage, domain name .com at the beginning in the title. What do you think? Thanks for your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | mdmoz0 -
How well do .ltd.uk domain names rank?
Hi all, do .ltd.uk domain names rank well? How well do they stack up against a .com or .co.uk? I'd really appreciate any feedback from people with any experience with these domains. Thanks John
Technical SEO | | john251810100 -
Domain Aliases
Hi there, I've got two sites mysite.com and mysite.org .org is indexed by google, .com doesnt seem to be. .com is used for some material that is sent out, and accounts for about 20% of incoming visotors. (80% end up on .org) Is there any positive or negative effect from this? Would I benefit from 301'ing the .com to .org?
Technical SEO | | dencreative0