Online Marketing From Home

Should you include keywords or a key phrase in your domain name or url? Will including selected keywords or key phrases help you to rank better in the search engines for those terms or doesn’t it make any difference?

The above questions are typical questions that I often see asked on forums, blogs and discussion groups. The answers to these questions often go from the one extreme to the other extreme…

So what is the truth?

I would like to answer this question in two parts.

Part 1

Based on my experience, including your keywords (or keyword phrase) in a domain name or url can help your search engine rankings. However, it will not have a major impact on your search engine rankings.

Before I continue, let’s just get some terminology out of the way so we are all on the same page.

http://subdomain.example.com/subdirectory/
      
In the above example:
The “url” is http://subdomain.example.com/subdirectory/
The “domain name” is example.com

Note: Everything after the slash (/), e.g. after example.com/ is called the “path”.

For a more detailed explanation on terminology, refer to:
Matt Cutts – Seo Glossary  

Let’s start with my own personal experience…

I have noticed in the past that whenever I use a domain name, that does not include highly competitive keywords or key phrases, that it is very easy to rank on the first page of Google, purely based on the domain name.

How do I know it is due to the domain name and nothing else?

That is easy to determine when the domain name appears nowhere else than in the url.

Based on this, I have no doubt in my mind that the domain name plays a role.

However, I am the first to admit that your domain name is not going to help you a lot if you are targeting highly competitive keywords.

For example, assuming you can get OnlineMarketing.com, you are not going to be on the first page of Google for the phrase “Online Marketing” (21 million results) purely based on your domain name! 

According to Matt Cutts of Google:

“Having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page”

and

“Including the keyword in the url just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in some way”

Source: Matt Cutts Blog

We all know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a minefield. There are so many things that the search engines take into consideration when ranking sites…

Even if keywords in your domain name or url only play a very small part towards your site’s ranking in the search engines, surely it should not be overlooked. It is normally only by having multiple “small parts” that a site achieves a good ranking.

This brings me to Part 2, perhaps the most important reason why you should try to include your keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name…

Part 2

Google is very clear about the fact that one of the ways you can create a Google-friendly site is to “Make sure that other sites link to yours” 

Source: Google Webmaster Help

What most SEO experts agree on is that anchor text plays a very important role.

For example: (Assume the keyword phrase of my site is “Online Marketing”)

If you link to my site the best type of link will look like this:
<a href=http://online-marketing-from-home.com>Online Marketing</a>
It will show as Online Marketing (anchor text) 

However, many sites will only link to you using your domain name. By including your keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name these links will be a lot more valuable than if your domain name is something like MySite.com     

By the way, the above linking method (using anchor text) does not only apply to Site A linking to Site B. It also applies to internal links on your own site. If you link to your home page from another page don’t use “Home Page” as the link, use “Keyword” as the link.

Tip: If you are working on getting many different links I suggest you use a variation of your “keyword” as the anchor text. Google may very well see 1000 links to your site all using the anchor text “Keyword” as unnatural and discount those links or even penalize your site.

It is better to have several different anchor texts such as “Keyword 1”, “Keyword 2”, “Keyword Phrase1”, etc. (related to each other) than only one standard anchor text.

Lastly, as with most things in life, too much of a good thing may not be good. Do things in moderation. A keyword-rich domain name such as home-based-internet-marketing.com is good. It contains your keywords and is user friendly.

A domain name such as home-based-internet-marketing-online-from-home-make-money.com is taking things a bit too far and I certainly won’t visit a site with such a domain name.

Trust you found this post useful. Please feel free to leave your comments.

To YOUR Online Marketing Success!

Francois du Toit

Buying links to artificially boost PageRank has become quite common in recent years, despite obvious disapproval from Google.

During the last Google PageRank update (October / November) many sites got severely penalized by Google for buying or selling links that pass PageRank. (Several of these sites took a big hit, such as dropping from a PR 6 to a PR 3)

Although many webmasters have reported that the drop in PageRank has not adversely affected their rankings in Google (organic traffic), the long-term impact is not yet evident…

Note: I recently posted an article here titled The Truth About The NoFollow Attribute where I explain the significance of Google PageRank as well as the NoFollow attribute. Suggest you refer to this article for a better understanding of what is meant by “PageRank” and “NoFollow”, if you are not familiar with these terms.

Paid Links and Link Schemes
  
Google is very clear about the fact that paid links that pass PageRank is in violation of their webmaster guidelines and can have a negative impact on your site’s ranking in their search results.

“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating”

“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results”

Google specifically includes “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank” as an example of a link scheme.

Source: Google – Link Schemes

In fact, Google even goes as far as encouraging people to report any site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank.

Source: Google – Why should I report paid links to Google?

What about paid advertising links?

This is what Google has to say about paid advertising links:

QUOTE

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

UNQUOTE

Source: Google – Why should I report paid links to Google?

When may it be worth it to buy links that pass PageRank?

In principle, it is not worth it if you are serious about search engine optimization. The fact that many webmasters have gotten away with it for a long time does not mean the risk of being discovered by Google is low.

Google is continuously working on improving their already advanced algorithm and trying to outsmart them for short-term gain is not very smart. I guess the question should be: “Do you feel lucky?”

I can only think of one case scenario where you may not care about the potential negative impact of buying links that pass PageRank, namely if you have no interest in how well your site ranks in Google.

Some webmasters could not care less about Google and PageRank. They are mainly interested in buying links on high traffic sites in order to get traffic. They do not rely on organic traffic. This is often the case when a webmaster is using a squeeze page, simply to build his list or subscriber base.

On the other hand, if you are serious about building a website or blog that will rank well in the search engines then I would strongly advise you against paying for links that pass PageRank. 

All the best,
Francois du Toit

The NoFollow attribute or NoFollow “tag”, as it is often referred to, has led to many heated debates amongst webmasters since it was first introduced by Google.

Although the debate on whether the NoFollow attribute should have been introduced, or should be used by webmasters, will probably never end, there are many misconceptions about it. I trust this post will clarify many of these misconceptions.

Let’s start at the beginning… What is the NoFollow attribute? Why did Google introduce it? Why do I need to know about it?      

What is the NoFollow attribute?

The NoFollow attribute is a bit of code that looks like this: rel=”nofollow”. It is not part of the visible content on a website or blog. It is used by webmasters to inform search engines, such as Google, how they should treat hyperlinks.

Example of a hyperlink not using the rel=”nofollow” attribute:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/”>My Website</a>

Example of a hyperlink using the rel=”nofollow” attribute:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>My Website</a>

In both above mentioned examples the phrase My Website (Anchor Text) will look identical and will be a clickable hyperlink. However, by using the NoFollow attribute in the second example Google will not give the link any credit.

To quote Google: “When Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results”.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

The best way to establish whether a website or blog is using the NoFollow attribute is to follow the following easy steps:
Step 1: Open the site in your browser
Step 2: Right click
Step 3: Left click on “View Source”
Step 4: Left click on “Find”
Step 5: Type in: nofollow

Should the site be using the rel=”nofollow” attribute it will be displayed.

Why did Google introduce it?

The simple answer is to combat comment spam. For example, to discourage comments like “For cheap Viagra click here” to be posted on blogs.

Before the NoFollow attribute was introduced comments could be posted on blogs, resulting in the poster getting a hyperlink (backlink) to his site as well as some traffic (site visitors) from people clicking on the hyperlink.

Backlinks from sites that use the NoFollow attribute are basically worthless.       

Google felt that if blogs were to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute that fewer spam comments would be posted just to get backlinks.

The main arguments against using the NoFollow attribute are:

1. If Mr. A makes a good comment on the blog of Mr. B (adds fresh content to the blog) surely he should be entitled to get some “link juice” from the blog for his efforts. If he does not get any “link juice” will he still take the time to post good comments in the hope that it will result in some traffic to his own site?  

2. Surely the owner of the blog can decide to pre-moderate all comments first before they appear live on the site and, even if he does not pre-moderate them, he can still delete all inappropriate and spam comments.

3. It has not had the desired effect of reducing comment spam.

4. Blogs, such as Wordpress blogs can combat spam by using selected plug-ins that can help identify and prevent comment spam.

Note: The NoFollow attribute is set as default on all new Wordpress blogs but can be removed by the blog owner.  

In my opinion, the main reason why Google introduced the rel=”nofollow” attribute was not really to help sites combat comment spam but to prevent the manipulation of Google’s algorithm.    
 
This is a bold statement. In order to understand its significance we have to understand the importance that hyperlinks play in Google’s algorithm, and we have to understand the significance of PageRank (Google Trade Mark).

According to Google, the heart of their software is PageRank - “A system for ranking web pages”. In the eyes of Google a link from page A to page B is a “vote” by page A for page B. The more “votes” a page gets the more important that page becomes.    
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Note: Relevancy plays a big role. For example, a link from page A (pornographic site) to page B (desert recipes site) is not relevant and will largely be discounted.

Google makes no secret about the fact that “webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432&hl=en
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&ctx=related 

The number of relevant links from high-quality sites determine the PageRank of a web page (on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest). All else being equal, web pages with a high PageRank will rank higher in the search engines for a specific keyword or key phrase than web pages with a low PageRank.

Note: Google does not rank sites only based on PageRank. There are many other factors they take into consideration. However, the fact remains that PageRank is an important factor.

When blogs started increasing in popularity Google realized they had a serious problem on their hands. Many people would spend hours every day just posting little comments on relevant and high-quality blogs to get one-way hyperlinks back to their own sites, thereby increasing the importance of their own sites as well as their search engine rankings. 

If Google left this unattended it would make a mockery of their PageRank system. They realized that many webmasters did not pre-moderate or moderate comments, often due to the fact that some blogs have hundreds of blog entries and many webmasters simply do not have the time to review all comments.

Based on the above, it can be argued that Google did themselves a favor by introducing the NoFollow attribute and that combating comment spam to help webmasters was of secondary concern. After all, the rel=”nofollow” link does not prevent spam comments from being posted and it does not prevent the hyperlinks from being clickable, sending traffic to the spammer’s website or blog.

Are there any advantages for webmasters to use the NoFollow attribute?

Absolutely!

1. It does limit content spam

Many spammers specifically look for blogs that do not use the NoFollow attribute and will not post comments on blogs that do. It is hard to estimate by how much spam comments have been reduced thanks to the NoFollow attribute.

I still see a lot of comment spam on blogs that do use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, presumably posted by people that have not checked whether or not the blog is using this attribute or by people that don’t care and simply post comments in the hope that it will generate some traffic to their website or blog.

I have seen some webmasters complain that using the NoFollow attribute has had a negative impact on people posting comments… Well, I would rather have fewer comments posted on my blog than many stupid comments from people that are only after backlinks, have nothing really to contribute and will probably never visit my blog again after posting!

2. It is important who you are linking to!    

As previously mentioned, a link from page A to page B is seen by Google as a “vote” by page A for page B. You cannot control the sites linking to your site but you can control the links from your site to other sites.

Google is very clear that webmasters should take care who they link to. According to Google: “Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected by those links”.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Checking out hundreds of posts and links to make sure they are not links to “bad neighborhoods” is practically just about impossible and a waste of time. 

By not using the rel=”nofollow” attribute you run a huge risk that at least some of the links on your site may point to “bad neighborhoods” and that Google may rightly penalize your site.

By using the NoFollow attribute you are basically saying to Google “I did not post this link, someone else did. The fact that this link is on my site should not be seen as a “vote” from my site to the other site.

People that post on blogs only to get backlinks will obviously be disappointed by the rel=”nofollow” attribute. What some webmasters do not realize is that even if a site does not use the NoFollow attribute, and is relevant to your own site, that if the site has a lot of hyperlinks the value of a hyperlink to your own site is very much watered down… Anyway, maybe this will be a good topic for a future blog entry.   

Thanks for reading this very long blog entry on the NoFollow attribute. I trust you have not had too much trouble staying awake. Looking forward to reading your comments!