Website Domains and their Impact on SEO

A number of factors are involved when considers the impact of a website domain with regards to SEO. I am going to give my views on the following four concepts.

• Domain Authority
• Age of the Domain/Website
• Difference between Website Age and Domain Age
• Keywords in Website Domains

But first lets have a look at what Google’s patent says about a website’s domain related information. I have taken a extract from SEOmoz’s article on “Google’s Patent – Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data”, you can read the entire patent here and SEOmoz’s version here.

Information associated with a domain can be used by Google to score sites in the rankings. They mention specific types of ” information relating to how a document is hosted within a computer network (e.g., the Internet, an intranet, etc.)” including:

• Doorway and “throwaway” domains – Google says they will use “information regarding the legitimacy of the domains”
• Valuable domains, according to Google, “are often paid for several years in advance”, while the throwaway domains “rarely are used for more than a year.”
• The DNS records will also be checked to determine legitimacy:
• Who registered the domain
• Admin & technical addresses and contacts
• Address of name servers
• Stability of data (and host company) vs. high number of changes
• Google claims they will use “a list of known-bad contact information, name servers, and/or IP addresses” to predict whether a spammer is running the domain.
• Google will also use information regarding a specific name server in similar ways –
  • “A “good” name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a “bad” name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new”

Since the scope of the article is limited, I am just going to brief on the first point which is as follows,

Information associated with a domain can be used by Google to score sites in the rankings: This clearly states that domain related factors(such as age, trust, authority, keywords etc.etc.etc) play a role in the ranking of a website. Now how much of that role impacts the rankings, well I leave the prediction to you guys, but the point is it does and that’s the point I am trying to make here.

So enough of the bla.bla, now lets just get in to business and here is my take on the above mentioned factors.

Domain Authority:
Ask any SEO what is domain authority and most of the answers will basically point down to links. Right but WRONG, Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People differs in his view and I seem to agree with most of the points that he makes but have reservations on some. He goes on to explain how SEOs view domain authority and how search engines identify authoritative and trusted sites. But at the end of the day, links do matter because that’s how search engines are basically doomed to work, go on read it, its a recommended read for any one who wants to know more about building authority.

Age of the Domain:
There are mixed views when it comes to the age of the domain as a ranking factor, personally I feel that it plays a influential part when it comes to rankings. The older the site, the more authority it would have gained by having a healthy back link profile(just an assumption). This makes rankings for newly optimized pages or improving the rankings for the website a little bit easy!

Difference between Website Age and Domain Age:
There is a difference between domain age and a website age, but mostly domain age is assumed to be the website age, CONFUSED. Domain age can just refer to domains that are just registered but never used. Whereas the website age is what matters the most, in the sense the website has pages and a backlink profile.

Keywords in Website Domains:
Keywords in domains are just gonna help you, I don’t care what anyone else says, this is my view and many agree with it. Just Google for seo and you will understand what I mean. 5 of the 10 results have seo in the domain name, 2 are from wikipedia and 1 from Google webmaster tools help. So if you are planning to get a domain for your website/business make sure to get one with you main keyword in it.

This is my take on domains and their impact on SEO, I would like to hear what you guys think, do drop a comment, after all these are what blogs are for.