Slight keyword variation domain name
-
I have recently changed a clients domain name from a long (23 characters) to a shorter domain name that has a keyword plus a single character variation. For example and without revealing the clients real domain name, let say they are in housing. Ithe first letter in the company name is "p" so i created the doamin name as www.phousing.com It has only been two days since i submitted the new domain name and did a 301 redirect to the new page. When i do a google search i get back the result: housing.com and "did you mean housing.com Will this domain name cause me problems? Any input is greatly appreciated!
-
"...by the time you told someone the address you where exhausted and the prospect was confused"
Best answer I ever heard!
-
Thank you Cyrus! To answer the question of why I changed their domain name in the first place,
- Original domain name had no relevance to the services they provide
- The domain name was 23 characters long, which I feel is way too long and allows for 23 opportunities for a client to misspell the name when writing emails, accessing the website, ect....
- The domain name was 7 syllables....by the time you told someone the address you where exhausted and the prospect was confused
- They had virtually no web presence, so the switch was simple enough. They had literally one link. The site was under 10 pages, so again, not a huge undertaking.
Again, thank you so much for the feedback. SEOmoz really has a great community!
-
Howdy,
Hmmmm... I have to wonder why you changed the domain name in the first place? There are certainly many legitimate reasons to do so, but it's a pretty drastic measure to do a domain migration and most of the time it's something most webmasters want to avoid unless they have to.
If the domain is close to a popular domain, you may continually run into the problem of Google trying to correct your spelling when folks search for your brand name - especially if the brand doesn't have a lot of visibility.
For example, if I registered the name mfacebook.com, Google would likely try to steer me towards Facebook time and time again (not to mention Facebook hitting me with Trademark issues
Will the domain name hurt your SEO? Probably not anymore than the normal risks involved with migrating a website to a new domain.
The bigger question that I think you want to address is: will Google recognize the keyword in the domain? Although Google does a pretty good job at discecting domain names (for example, they know that bluewidgets.com is "blue widgets") the algorythm isn't perfect. SEOmoz.org is a perfect example. For years Google didn't give us credit for the keyword "SEO" because "moz" wasn't a common word. So instead, we were clumped together in the "SEOmoz" (single word) category.
My best advice, if you want to take advantage of keywords in the URL for an existing domain, is to use them sparingly in subdirctories and file names, such as example.com/keyword.
Regardless, keep us up to date on your progress. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Thank you very much for your response. I actually changed their domain name again just to avoid potential issues. I find myself frequently these days having to base domain and website development decisions on the fact that i am afraid google will penalize my sites. I mean there are legitimate whitehat methods that are in my clients best interests, but because an unethical person may use a method that is similiar for black hat purposes. Google is penalizing the good guys for the sake of restricting some bad guuys. For example i guess some people trying to trick the engines by putting a single character variable in a popular keyword name, but my clients case they wanted their companies first initial plus industry. They or i am not trying to "trick" the engines, it just made sense for them , but now i have to select an inferior domain name....
-
Hi
Your site is recently registered, whilst the other site with a very similar domain name is old then your site, the likelihood is that users are searching for that one rather than your new one, hence the occasional auto-correct. Given a bit of time this should resolve itself
Wait for some time & you will find your domain name.
Hope this helps.
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
-
What keywords & phrases are my competitors targeting?
I wanted to compare our keyword focus, to my competitors. What is the best way to audit what type of content / keywords - my competitors are using?
Competitive Research | | jwochna0 -
Where do we find a Keyword Discovery Tool in SEOmoz?
I've been looking for a way to compare keywords amongst my competition websites.
Competitive Research | | homesonthesound0 -
Keyword difficulty/research question
Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users' I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month). As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list. Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress. The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword. Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later? Thanks Carl
Competitive Research | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Competitive Domain Analysis
What is the best way to improve this in reference to my competition? My site(s) are formatted well, returning no errors or warnings. I have removed my keyword meta-tag and tested my sites against the keywords that we want to appear under. Now I need to close the gap on the competition.
Competitive Research | | bobbabuoy0 -
Tool for finding what keywords a competitor ranks for?
Does anyone know of any good tools that display what keywords a competitor ranks for? I have many competitors that I know get a lot of traffic, but I'm not entirely sure where the traffic comes from so it would be nice to plug in their url and get a general overview of what keywords they rank for and what positions.
Competitive Research | | shawn810 -
Trying to rank against keyword in domain
I am trying to rank for let's say the keyword "their site" , my competitor has theirsite.com, with next to no seo but are ranking #1 , my site lets say is mysite.com/their-site my site is about the same age and has a PR of 4,their site has a PR of 0 and 2 backlinks, how difficult will it be to get to number 1, am at spot # 5 in google now. Thanks David
Competitive Research | | David750 -
Domain name advice please
Hi i am trying to work out what is the best when it comes to domain names. What i mean is, should you go short or should you try and fit in what you need. So as follows. say i need a domain name that i wanted to buy which i have done research and found that these two words together are good keywords. please note that this is an example the two keywords are manchester airport and the next two keywords are cheap flights should i get a domain name that say manchesterairportcheapflights or should i have a shorter domain name like manchester cheap flights or another example say i wanted a domain name that fitted the following two keywords in manchester hotels budget accomodation should i just get a domain name that says manchester hotels or should it get the following manchesterhotelsbudgetaccomodation I am looking at buying a number of domain names and i am trying to find out if shorter is better or if a longer domain name is better
Competitive Research | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Why are links not being added to my Domain Authority
I have just compared my domain authority with competitors and I can see that they are outscoring me on links from YouTube etc. Even though I have same set-up with regard YouTube and Squidoo etc and am also featured on Dmoz... these are not being added to my domain authority. Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | manedog0