Are keyword-heavy domains still any good for SEO purposes?

Like most web publishers, you know it makes sense to base your work on a good domain name.

For instance, if you have a job site for Milwaukee and you attach it to a weird domain name, it might score lower grades, SEOwise, than a keyword-rich one, like “milwaukeejobs.com” or “jobs-in-milwaukee.com” but it seems Google has stopped favoring domain names that actually mean something.

Instead, Google’s new page-rank algorithm —otherwise known as “the Google dance”— evaluates web sites based on a secret array of criterias which, according to InfluenceFinder, have less and less to do with a good domain name.

Here’s the original news piece which announces Google’s parting with the keyword-heavy domain names love affair:

Google has recently changed its page-ranking criteria and reduced its reliance on keyword-heavy domain names when calculating search engine rankings. This may affect the way companies design their search engine marketing campaigns.

John Straw, InfluenceFinder chief executive at Econsultancy explains that Google has gradually reduced the impact of root domain names. No longer than one year ago, this was weighted significantly heavier than today when compiling rankings.

It can be hard for marketers to keep up with Google when the company constantly changes the algorithms that calculate the search engine rankings. A SEM strategy can go from highly valuable to outdated from one day to the other if Google decides that, for instance, mobile rendering or keyword densities will have a bigger impact on the rankings.

Some of the changes are rather easy to adapt to, whereas others are more expensive and time consuming to follow up on. For instance, if a company recently bought an expensive, keyword-heavy domain name, it is now highly inconvenient that Google decided to disparage this as a criterion for a high search engine ranking.

In a way, it makes sense.

Think of those weird “this-is-the-best-keyword-combination.com” domain names which nobody typed in but which scored high in Google’s search engine. Those were blatantly exagerated domain names but Google should refrain from parting too quickly from genuinely descriptive domain names.

If anything, this could actually hurt Google as web users will go back to typing domain names directly as the Mountain View giant skids towards a different way of valuing the relevancy of web destinations.

Google is known to do things in such a way that the end-user can access quality information quickly so let’s see if this latest move will actually yield that kind of benefit.

Tags: google, search engine, algorithm, searching, find information, domains, domain names, domainers, domaining, relevancy, keywords, keyword-rich domains