Is Your Domain Name Important For Ranking…
From time to time the search engine giants of the Internet provide a guiding hand or a few words of advice to SEO specialists and marketers. This week those words of wisdom came from Bing, in a blog post by Senior Product Manager Duane Forrester (http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/01/15/domain-name-importance-in-ranking.aspx).
According to Forrester, domain names have little relevance in modern search engine ranking algorithms, and it is a ‘myth’ that keyword rich domain names can have a substantial impact on where you appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
“Ranking today is a result of so many signals fed into the system [that] the words used in a domain send less and less information.” He points out that this declining importance of keywords in domain names is in part a response to the ease with which spammers were abusing the system by having thin content but a keyword-rich domain name.
He does, however, stress that there is no harm in having keywords in your domain name, and that, “if you’re focused on the user experience and relevancy… the value [of having keywords in the domain name] remains intact to a degree.” This suggests that while you might want to include keywords where possible, there’s little point in paying big money for such a domain name from an SEO perspective.
Bing secures search
In a separate development, Bing has unveiled its own secure search, following in the footsteps of Google. This means that all user searches on https://www.bing.com will be done through a secure connection, but only if the user specifically visits the secure search address. This has caused many SEO professionals to speculate over whether they may soon lose keyword data for Bing as well as Google (see our post several weeks ago on this for more info).
Though Bing is for the moment keeping secure search an option that many casual users may be unaware of, it seems possible if not probable that they will try to keep up with Google and go fully secure all the time at some point in the future. This may eventually leave online marketers in the dark when it comes to keyword referral data, but, as ever, the SEO industry is sure to adapt by finding new ways to gather intelligence.
