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Domain Name vs. Great Content

by elcabron
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've been out of the SEO game for a few years. Can someone with some RECENT experience tell me what the deal is with keyword domains vs good content (which G always talks about)

I see sites with very poor content rank high. The ONLY thing they seem to have going for them is a highly targeted keyword domain name.

Sites with great content a pushed down in the SERP to make room for these new 'one hit wonders'. Is this the new way to do SEO - just get a kw domain? Seems ridiculous considering how much G is touting that quality content is king.

Also - is the GOOGLE dance still around? I've had a sudden & major drop in SERP and bouncing from constructing proper solid content links, the kind Matt Cuts always endorses - go figure.

I guess my main question would be: What's working and what isn't these days?

Sorry for the long post - been out of it for a while... Any help is highly appreciated
#content #domain #great #keyword #rank #serp
  • Profile picture of the author netherlands10
    A good domain name does help for exact match. If a user searches 'x y' and you own xy.com with relevant content you should appear. However, if the user searches 'x y z', 'z x y' or even 'y x', don't expect to rank unless the other terms are relevant to your content and you've SEO'd correctly.

    Google's approach to this is sound - if you're searching for 'x y' you might be after that business/website anyway.
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    • Profile picture of the author elcabron
      Originally Posted by netherlands10 View Post

      A good domain name does help for exact match. If a user searches 'x y' and you own xy.com with relevant content you should appear. However, if the user searches 'x y z', 'z x y' or even 'y x', don't expect to rank unless the other terms are relevant to your content and you've SEO'd correctly.

      Google's approach to this is sound - if you're searching for 'x y' you might be after that business/website anyway.
      Thank you for the reply... So I'm trying to wrap my head around this:

      For example: if you type in "TV" there is a good chance you're looking to buy one, not see what's on (or viceversa). I'm not sure this is a sound approach since everyone and their grandma is rushing to buy out the latest kw domain and fill it with useless info. If now it floats to the top of the SERPs how is the public served?

      Amazon, Netflix etc... most nobody serious has a kw for a domain, they have a company name. Even info sites like "About.com". If you buy "chevyfenders.com" chances are it's just a useless content redirect to a real auto store.
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  • Profile picture of the author MrMontgomery
    Poor content will continue to loose ranking. EMD or not. Put good quality content anywhere or if possible good content on EMD. Because EMD will still rank high if content is good. The Google EMD update was supposed to filter out the poor quality content emds. Not the good ones. I would any day put quality content on a high PR domain over an EMD though.
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    • Profile picture of the author elcabron
      Originally Posted by MrMontgomery View Post

      Poor content will continue to loose ranking. EMD or not. Put good quality content anywhere or if possible good content on EMD. Because EMD will still rank high if content is good. The Google EMD update was supposed to filter out the poor quality content emds. Not the good ones. I would any day put quality content on a high PR domain over an EMD though.
      Thank you for the help - I appreciate it. That's the thing that I see - good content gets pushed down in favor of EMD. I'm not the only one that notices this - I've seen other threads detailing this on this very forum.
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  • Profile picture of the author bymarcot
    I still don`t understand how Google determines "good and quality" content. It`s just a machine which works using it`s algorithm. It may determine duplicate content but it can`t determine how good or valuable it is. It may value the site structure but not the quality of the content (unless it`s manually reviewed).
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Google could care less about great content or domain names.
      They never did. People used parlor tricks to sell domains.

      Why do you think 2 of the biggest IM forums have digitalpoint
      and warrior in their domains?

      And great content? Google loves digitalpoint and WF. And the
      "content" is anything but great. The info is good, but the
      actual content, is lousy. Ditto for wikipedia, yahoo answers,...

      Paul
      Signature

      If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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  • Profile picture of the author patco
    Great content of course... A domain name can help you rank for ONE single keyword... If it can bring you thousand of visitors, maybe... But with unique content and nice backlinks, you can rank for other keywords no matter your domain name is DIFFERENT from ALL these keywords!
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    • Profile picture of the author elcabron
      Originally Posted by patco View Post

      Great content of course... A domain name can help you rank for ONE single keyword... If it can bring you thousand of visitors, maybe... But with unique content and nice backlinks, you can rank for other keywords no matter your domain name is DIFFERENT from ALL these keywords!
      I thought about that too... But wouldn't you run into the SAME problem. I mean unless you've thought about the 'magic' keyword that every person searches for but somehow every marketer missed, wouldn't you run into keyworded domains for every search you can think of... I guess you can collect the bottom of the barrels so to speak, but the top keywords would be dominated by people having 10/20 domains for the kw.

      So the solution is to rank for "other" keywords and let people with kw domains get the "thousands of visitors" as you put it? Most domains have 5/15 kw that bring in 90% of the cash There are of course variations, but G upholds the ranking even for variations. So let's say you have ABC domain... a CAB search will still yield page 1 results. Some people say that if you have ABC.com you won't rank for a CAB search... but that's simply not true - you DO rank, and you pretty much rank the same.
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  • Profile picture of the author bymarcot
    Yes, unique content. It can be done easily. But every day i read "you need quality content" and so on. I call it total BS. I like to test things and i can say that even scraped, mixed and spun content ranks very well. Yes i know - content needs to convert and that`s why it needs to have quality. But there are so many methods how to use this kind of crappy content (which you get free) and make way better conversions than using "quality content". As long as i`ve tested for ranking purposes the "quality content" and "scraped+mixed+spun content" have the same value for rankings.

    Cheers
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  • Profile picture of the author technics
    Great content will always be beneficial, if not directly through SEO than through giving your potential customers what they want. A domain name while slightly advantageous for one keyword will lack without proper on/off page SEO.

    Of course nothing is stopping you from having both, right?
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