Matt Cutts recently posted a video in which he discusses the importance of having your target keywords in your domain name.
I know that a lot of people find this to be important in the world of SEO, so it’s interesting to hear what Matt has to say.
Some of my thoughts?
I’ve never really been completely convinced that a keyword domain is super-duper-important. Case in point would be my web site about saltwater aquariums.
Aquarist-Refuge.com – that’s the domain name for that web site, but it ranks very well for the keywords “saltwater aquarium” and “saltwater aquariums”. This is not at all because of the domain name. The domain name doesn’t even have the keyword “aquarium” in it.
However, with proper on-site SEO and other efforts, it ranks well for those keywords.
That is why I’m personally not very convinced that a keyword domain is all that important. I do however believe that it holds weight and if you want to use a keyword domain it can help to rank more quickly. It took a certain amount of time and effort to get that site ranked well for “saltwater aquariums”, and I am entirely convinced that if my domain was “saltwateraquariums.com” that I wouldn’t have had to work as hard.
That being said, I do like keyword domains. I seem to be able to get a site to rank with less effort if I can get a domain that has the target keywords in it. However, none of those domain names are terribly inspiring or brandable.
Either way, Matt is basically saying here that Google is looking to put less weight on keyword domains. He doesn’t say they are going to have no weight, he just says they are going to dial it down a bit. Sounds fine to me.
I might not have to worry about finding keyword domains as much as I used to in the past if I wanted to rank well and rank soon for a particular keyword. But that is speculation, only time will tell.
When it comes to duplicate content, it is easy to find many varying opinions. I’ve run across many forum discussions or blog posts about what constitutes duplicate content and whether or not duplicate content will get you penalized.
There are as many opinions as you can possibly imagine, and for the most part everybody is guessing or making educated guesses as to what duplicate content is and how it can affect your site rankings.
What it really comes down to though, in my opinion, is who’s rules do we need to play by?
I don’t like to use duplicate content for anything. I don’t like to take articles already published on other sites and use them on my own sites. I don’t like to take submissions from authors if they are submitting the same content to other web sites.
That’s my stance though.
It doesn’t matter what I think, what matters is who gets to set the rules and who gets to enforce rules.
Why? Mainly because they are my biggest source of traffic, and I’m trying to get traffic from their playground (their search engine). So, if I’m going to play in their playground, I need to play by their rules.
Also, Google’s duplicate content rules and notes just make sense. They seem to me to be like a “good practice” guide for anybody that is trying to sort out the best ways to use (or the best reasons to avoid) content that is published elsewhere on the web.
A few things that I like about Google duplicate content policies:
They recommend the best ways to handle url variations and robots/spidering to make sure that there is no confusion for the bots on your web site.
They outline the fact that content that is even partially duplicated can still be identified by their system as duplicate.
They make Webmaster Tools available to help us help their spiders, which is very nice of them.
For these reasons, I tend to avoid the following when placing content on my sites:
I don’t like to use snippets of text from other sites unless it’s a direct, relevant quote, and I link to the source.
I prefer to write all content from scratch or have somebody write it from scratch. That way I avoid publishing something to my site that is already published on another site, word for word.
I like to use plugins for WordPress (the main site platform that I use) to help robots better sort out the content on my pages and to help them steer clear of author or tag pages that may show content that is already elsewhere on my sites.
I mentioned that I use WordPress. WordPress is a blogging platform. And out of the box, it shows the latest posts on the home page. So, in many cases you could say that the home page of a WordPress blog is just showing duplicate content from other pages on your site. Google hints that this may be a bad idea, but I don’t think it really matters all that much, mainly because so many sites use that type of format. Many valuable, informative sites.
So even though Google mentions that as a possible negative (showing content on the home page that exists elsewhere in the site), I don’t think it really is anything to worry about.
Anyways, I’m done rambling now. If you are worried about using or handling duplicate content on your web sites, I would suggest reading through Google’s guidelines on this matter and form your own opinion. Don’t form an opinion before you understand how they look at this matter.
I have to admit, when I first saw the announcement when I logged into my Linkvana account the other day, I thought “hmm… something more to spend money on, is it even worth it?”
Linkvana isn’t really that cheap to start with (see my recent Linkvana review for more details), so the fact that they are adding services that require you to spend more money to take advantage of them can be kind of insulting.
But, I took a deeper look at the blog commenting service details and I think it might be worth a trial run, just to see what type of impact it makes on one of my projects.
Read on to learn more about the details of this blog commenting service.
One thing that I’ve noticed recently when looking at search ranking positioning reports is that the positioning of the sites I manage on both Yahoo & Bing is starting to look very similar. It’s not exactly identical yet, but it’s getting close.
I’ve given it about a 3 month trial run (well not technically a trial, since I’ve been paying for it), and I’m very happy with the results I’m getting.
I’m getting better results than I thought I would at first. But I had to go through some ups and downs before reaching this point.
Matt Cutts has a good video today in which somebody poses the question “Is there such a thing as building too many links?”
Of course the answer isn’t black and white, but I like this answer. I really just makes sense and it reinforces the ideas behind building sites that have good content. It seems that all roads lead to one nation, the nation of “Quality Content”.
Now, creating buzz around your quality content is a whole different story, but let’s leave it at that for now.
When looking for content for a web site, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of ways to get some bits of text to put on your web pages without writing it all yourself.
In my case, I typically like to write most of the content for my sites, mainly because I’m a stickler for quality. But, I do sometimes break down and take articles submissions from other sources, if the quality is good.
Which brings me to my current rant. Actually, this isn’t so much a rant as much as it is a point of view that hopefully gives article publishers some insight into building quality articles.
