Hi, All!

This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer...

From David LaFerney:

It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query.

If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases?

In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>>

To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit.  (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.)  But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links?  Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword?  Or absolutely nothing?  (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.)

Thanks in advance!

Hi Dylan,

Thanks - that was very helpful.  I sent the link off to the site webmaster, so hopefully that will be taken care of.

Thanks, Dylan.  That's something to bear in mind if the client would be interested.  But back to the original question: is this because store.example.com is a different subdomain?  If it were example.com/store - would we be having this issue?

Thanks!

Hi!

One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com.  When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com.  Is this because of the subdomain issue?

How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain?

Thanks!

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the reply (and the link, of course!) - must have missed that whiteboard friday video.....

OK, so my interpretation of that is that if the additional letters change the word enough, it probably won't rank for the basic word. If the changes are reasonably simple (like singular/plural) then I guess that Google can work that out. Also (although not mentioned in the video), if you have a word made up of a couple of real words, like bluewidget.com, it seems that Google can work out which word is which.

Would you agree?

I'd just like to clarify - in Hebrew, the additional "words" are actually additional letters added to the beginning or end (or both) of the keyword.

It's as if in English you would write "when you (masculine singular) want" as "whenyoumswant", i.e. in a single word. Do you think that Google would be able to work out which words were really part of whenyoumswant?

Hi, All!

This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English:

How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text?  If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as?  Does it count toward "house"?  Does it count toward "in the house" only?  Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"?

I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary?

Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others.

Thanks in advance!