Can the length of a domain name affect SERP

GerardWon

GerardWon

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Dec 6, 2008
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So I'm making my way through the The Mother Fuckin SEO Question and Answer Thread and I might have missed this so I'll ask here...

Can the length of a domain name adversely affect your SERP? The name I want has 27 letters ( its four words that describes my niche) I want to promote it organically.

What are the most characters you would use?

Thanks.
 


the only thing it would really affect is type-in traffic. if it's good keywords though, you'll be fine
 
My longest domain is 4 words, a total of 29 letters. But it's an exact match, so I'm doing fine in the SERPS.
 
No problem, today navigation is granular, traffic is driven by search engines and linking strategies, a little part of web users type in URLs.
If you can add dashes, Matt Cutts has finally explained that dashes are seen by big G algorithms as spaces, this is a good thing for broad and phrase matching.
 
Thanks folks -- I really appreciate your responses!

What was said was basically what I understood to be true.
 
In the one search algo I know by heart (now defunct European search engine), the length of the domain (actually, the whole document path) DID have a negative effect.

But... in the big picture, that effect was very small and you can still rank very well.

Also, it set the length of the path in relation to the length of the query.

As in: if you are searching for a 3 word query string, the path to a document with all words in the URL will be longer... hurrr...

::emp::
 
emp said:
As in: if you are searching for a 3 word query string, the path to a document with all words in the URL will be longer... hurrr...

::emp::
Click to expand...

Not anymore, searches are cached on big G servers (similar to Stored Procedure), the first one does a keyphrase based query and voilà, the query is stored forever.
 
..err??

if I want 3 words in the URI (including the subdomain), for example:

"free colon cleanse"

www.cleanseyourcolonfree.com/now.html - 37 characters

is longer than a path that reacts to a shorter query:

"colon cleanse"

www.cleanseyourcolon.com - 33 characters

in our example, the second URI would not have all the query terms included, but the first URI would have a worse ratio for the second query.

The query:
"colon cleanse" - is 12 characters long, omitting the spaces

for this query, the first URL has a ratio of 12/37 = 0.32, the second URL has a ratio of 12/33=0.36, and fares slightly better.

As this is the calculation that takes place in the raniing process, no caching would help you.

But... remember: I did not work at google and this was only a very small part in a huuge ranking algo.

::emp::
 
Jesus Christ at the math.

If you had tits I'd stalk you, emp.

@OP: I have dozens -- possibly more than a hundred -- long tail keyword domains and most of the ones that have landers and minisites on them do fine with ranking. I would recommend against a long domain that isn't exact match on a decently-searched phrase, and also point out that search practices change over time and most commonly affect the longer phrases. So bear in mind when registering four-word and longer domains, that they may not be an exact match for anything next time keyword tools update their data.


Frank
 
Flash4Ever said:
If you can add dashes, Matt Cutts has finally explained that dashes are seen by big G algorithms as spaces, this is a good thing for broad and phrase matching.
Click to expand...

fascinating. never seen any evidence either way about this so usually people say to avoid it. i can't really say as i just have one site with a dash and it does fine.
 
qualo said:
fascinating. never seen any evidence either way about this so usually people say to avoid it. i can't really say as i just have one site with a dash and it does fine.
Click to expand...

Well, I haven't tried it either, but from what I understand a dashed domain is not a problem in terms of seo. However, if you try to sell the dashed-domain site it might be more difficult.
 
wolfent said:
Well, I haven't tried it either, but from what I understand a dashed domain is not a problem in terms of seo. However, if you try to sell the dashed-domain site it might be more difficult.
Click to expand...

I go along with wolf (and a few others); no negative effect.

However, if you are planning on getting links from certain CMS's, they
have a tendency to truncate the URL in order to form the anchored text.

just a thought,
Bompa
 
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