The word is out. You can now register domain names of up to 67 characters. This is going to shoot your ranking way up on search engines. Because if you stuff all your keywords into your domain name, search engines are simply going to love your site. Or so they say...But is that really truth?
No point speculating. Let's do a little test...
Go to your favorite search engine, say AltaVista. Key in your search term, say "website promotion." Look at top 10 rankings, closely.
How many of these top rankings actually have full term "website promotion" in their domains?
No hype, just facts.
Call me a natural sceptic if you want. When news hit town, with all "Special Announcements" flying everywhere, urging people to "go grab a new all-you-can- stuff keyword rich domain name and emerge tops in search engine ranking," I was not at all moved. I believe this is too simplistic an approach to getting high search engine placements:
1. Besides keywords in domain names, search engines look at a few other factors for relevancy. In fact, this is what Don Dodge, AltaVista's Director of Engineering said: "Keywords in domain name do not help much in ranking. We look at half a dozen factors in ranking. The words on page, their frequency and position on page, are still among most important factors."
2. Search engines are constantly evolving. Once they find out that such keyword-stuffed domain names are content-poor sites with low relevance, they are going to come up with new rules to preclude such sites from getting top spots.