This statement is the problem Stephen. It’s categorical and stated as fact but as far as I’m aware you have no experience to back it up, and I ask you yet again to post your experience with SEO to justify the authority with which you regularly make these kind of statements. This isn’t a personal attack it’s a request which you shouldn’t have any difficulty complying with. You represent this forum and your posts have weight, your responsibility to be accurate and be able to back up your statements is far greater than for a regular poster.
If you started your posts with ‘I think’ or ‘in my opinion’ we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
You’re wearing a ‘guru’ badge. I would expect a guru to have extensive experience of all aspects of they are in which they’re deemed a guru. Is that unreasonable?
‘turning down’ isn’t the same as ‘very minor’ is it and it implies that they had an overly strong impact at the time. The evidence would suggest that domains have more than a ‘very minor’ impact. I don’t know for sure either but I’m not making statements as if they were indisputable fact.
That made me realise I could at least test felgall’s assertion. Friends registered two domains, one four years ago and one two years ago. Neither has ever had a site hosted on it, and both redirect at present to the hosting company with whom they were registered. No amount of searching on Google, Yahoo! or Bing produced any sign of either domain, which seems to confirm what felgall and Stevie D are saying.
While I’m no nearer to actually proving it, that does also seem to confirm my original theory that the practise is useless for improving SERP. If anyone has further information, or a more scientific study, I would be interested to see it. Meanwhile, thanks for the replies.
That is fairly normal though not always so. But no trace at all you will note due to the domain not being used for anything SERP, SEO or Backlink related so you should add that to the criteria of your experiment there Technobear EG not much research went into the conclusions.
Please though in order to be sure that what you are now agreeing is your assumption is true, try using one site as a link builder to a real site with content and do it by stages to experiment as that is the only way to be sure rather than assume a redirect to a hosts site is giving you the full picture
I would give an example of someone with ten years of backlinks pointing towards a new domain but sadly I don’t really have the right to do so as the knowledge is confidential between myself and the person whose site it is.
I will add however this site has some page one ranks but they are down to pretty much the Domain Name (pointed out as less relevant above) and all those backlinks as the SEO on the site is now almost non existent other than mostly by luck of association
BTW I thought I might add a little surprise seeing as my interjections are being over talked (or to some extent taken with a pinch of salt) by others with the rep on here >
Tell me who is number 1 please? (or two LOL darn thing is different in different browsers and on different pc’s)
As I mentioned, that was not intended to be a scientific experiment - I just realised I could test whether or not a redirected domain is indexed.
The reason for my original question, as I said before, is that I have come across several people who are spending £50 or £60 per year to own parked domains that, as far as I can see, are doing nothing for them. They do this because they were told that it would help. My instinct is to tell them to save their money, or spend it on something that might actually work, but I make no claims to know anything at all about off-page SEO, so I wanted to see what more knowledgeable folk than myself think. Unfortunately, the person who gave them this advice has since died, so I can’t ask him what he was basing it on.
perhaps the best way of determining whether something will help SEO is to ask if it will help real people to find the site. The goal of the search engines is to help people find the pages with the information those people are looking for. If the search engines could actually do what they are trying to achieve then there’d be no SEO at all - SEO is just adjusting things so as to make it easier for the dumb search engines to find out what they are looking for about the web pages based on their limited ability.
As for the domain name being a minor factor - Google uses over 200 different tests to determine placement in search results. Does anyone realistically expect that the domain name would play a part in more than a small number of these tests. Even if it is a part of 90 of these tests it would still be a relatively minor factor.
Most SEO is just common sense and knowledge of how the web works. If you make the pages attractive to real people as your first concern then any legitimate SEO tweaking will be minor. Anything more than that would be trying to scam the search engines and while it might get you a better ranking now it will get you banned later. Once search engines do become intelligent enough to actually work out the right pages to display it will be interesting to see just how many currently top ranking sites are gone from the results.
There are plenty of other forums that have much more knowledgeable members on the subject of SEO, unfortunately I can’t name them but if you google seo forum you can ask this same question and get answers from people with practical experience. You’re better asking this quesiton of people who do SEO for a living and don’t just imagine themselves to be knowledegable about it.
The SEO forum on Sitepoint should be closed and replaced with the stickies written by Stymiee and Aspen.
Really… explain how nofollow links help people find your site and how they help SEO? What a ridiculous thing to say.
Nope, the goal of the search engines is to make a profit.
So your categorical statement that domains have a ‘very minor’ impact is just a guess based on knowing that there are 200+ ranking signals (they’re not called ‘factors’ or ‘tests’ stephen).
But in answer to your question, yes, given that Google saw fit to make an entire video about how they were going to address the problem of overpowered exact match domains and I don’t see them doing it for most of the other 200+ signals AND given how much I’ve read on the subject in posts written on SEO forums by people who HAVE tested this and DO know something about SEO because they actually do it for a living, I realistically expect that domains play much more than a ‘minor’ part in rankings.
I see. So your authoritive, categorical statements on SEO are you using your common sense?
Can you do me a favour? Please list the 200+ signals that Google use in their ranking algo and then place them in order of importance, should be easy, just use your common sense.
First word or two or three sometimes four and even five words in your title are the A1 most important factor/signal to every search engine (well every search engine that matters in this context
Obviously Wolfram Alpha couldn’t give two hoots about each pages Title (note the each page there).
According to what you have just stated Google (or presumably other spiders reading words on the web) cannot see these words on the number ten site and does not recognise their existence in any way (they can’t see them after all) and although they can’t see these links and words they will mark them as duplicate content
Now at the risk of getting this deleted and myself banned do you realise how incredibly stupid your statements sound when put together and dissected as I just tried to do to to simplify things and explain why what you are saying does not make any logical sense?
Either “the-worlds-best-kept-secret.com” is ignored because it doesn’t have a web page attached to it and so there is no actual page for it to provide a benefit to OR it points to the same page as “the-worlds-best-kept-secret-revealed.com” and is therefore duplicate content which will also be ignored.
Of course in that situation you would have TEXT in the link for people to click on to get to the destination page and that text would be significant for SEO.
The important thing to remember is that SEO is defined by the search engines as black hat and ANYTHING that you do that doesn’t make the experience better for real people will eventually be penalised. Eventually the scamster profession of “SEO Expert” will cease to exist. If you make the experience as friendly as possible for real people then it may not have quite as great an immediatel impact as scamming the search engines vis SEO but it will have a more significant effect long term.
The most important reason for getting additional domains for a single web site has nothing whatever to do with SEO. By getting those extra domains you prevent other people from getting them and setting up competing sites. Any SEO effect of having the additional domains is effectiveloy ZERO in comparison to the impact that has.
So you are now saying that to use a domain in directories as a redirect, let’s say in order to make sure the directory listings didn’t interfere with your own Serps and other online marketing, is “Black Hat” and would in some way be detrimental to the end users experience.
felgall where do you get this stuff from? It is still making no sense. Do you do SEO at all? Proper SEO I mean where you get results based on making the search results better match the search queries and use “links” for other things that work with your natural SERPS?
There is nothing “Black Hat” or anything like it in what I have mentioned. Black Hat seeks to find holes they can exploit whereas god SEO works with the SE’s and the above I have mentioned in no way does anything that works to the contrary.
If you think and believe that the only and important reason for other domains of similar names or context is just to stop others I will leave you with your thinking Sir as that suits those who think differently just fine.
The 301 command is an instruction that basically indicatesd “this address has permanently changed sp please ignore this address and substitute the one it redirects to”. Why would you expect a search engine to disregard an HTTP code that is instructing it to ignore the address?
If you want the redirecting domain to not be ignored then you would either use a 302 redirect to indicate that the redirect is only temporary or you would need to intercept the 301 before it is sent and replace it with a 200 instead so as to indicate that the access was successful and to ignore that the redirect happened at all.
If you don’t understand basic HTTP codes then you obviously have no idea of what you are doing with SEO.
A 301 redirect is specifically an instruction to IGNORE the address that is being redirected BECAUSE it has been PERMANENTLY changed.
Would your definition of ‘SEO expert’ be people who make categorical statements about how search engines rank pages when they don’t actually know?
The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife
Anyway, I’ve asked you a number of questions on this thread that you’ve steadfastly ignored so here they are again, for the benefit of everyone reading this thread, if you’d be so kind as to take your valuable time and actually answer them:
What is the actual SEO experience from which you draw to make your statements, like domains have a ‘very minor impact’?
Can you list the 200+ ranking signals just using your common sense?
If things that help SEO are the things that help real people find your website (as you said in post #26), how does ‘nofollow’ fit into your SEO theories?
OK I will take your word for it that I don’t know what I am doing
Actually you could be right
I am only number 2 on Google for “hire best SEO writer” and only have number one on Bing & Yahoo so as I can’t get number 1 on Google and only have position 2 I suppose you are right, I can’t know owt about SEO now can I? I mean position 2 that’s rubbish isn’t it?
Drop me off some of that Moonshine you re running there bandit I shall need some after this
RE the second indicator
Good call
There are only 4 winners in the Domain name game
Exact Match
Brands
Those who do the SEO or get it done
or 4th those with the marketing budget “Simples”
So I think we should let someone else give us number 3
Anyone like to offer something?
Or are we just to continue with the “lets tell people what I heard type of thing where we listen but we do not try for ourselves to see if what this person or that person says is actually true” type of thing?
My point exactly. I’m not really saying that exact match domains are #2.
There’s enough evidence to suggest that domains have more than a ‘minor impact’, plus there’s the fact that felgall has a habit of making authoratitive statements like that without actually having the knowledge or experience to do it and I’m simply trying to get him to either stop doing it, politely, of course or… back it up with some actual evidence and/or practical experience.
But… no one here can say one way or the other. It’s just a question of how you interpret the evidence.
I’m just waiting to see if he’ll actually answer my questions.
If anyone wants to know how difficult it can be to beat some exact match domains I would suggest they search
“Hire An Illustrator”
Then I dare anyone to tell me that exact match is not only important it is a huge factor.
So huge it is actually also a huge problem
A problem Google presently do not have a solution to.
Masses of Counterfeit goods are sold via exact match domain named sites. Problem is though circa 98% of how Google deals with the info it finds involves text and making sense of that text, so how they are going to tackle the exact match domain problem without it affecting legit ones is up for speculation for many a month more and beyond me thinks.
Speculation
That’s a nice word that “Speculation” it sums up the sort of thing that Copyscape could pick up with a bit of fine tuning if you get my drift
It’s quite easy to speculate and it sound authoritative
Excuse me, but there is already a perfectly good question in this thread, which is the one I asked initially and you seem not to have answered.
Clearly, you have a problem with felgall. Might I suggest you find a way to sort it out that doesn’t involve hi-jacking this or any other thread? You might disagree with his replies, but at least he has tried to answer my question, several times, very civilly. I have re-read this entire thread three times and am unable to find your answer to my original post.
Please could we put down the handbags and get this thread back on topic?
I’m sorry if you feel I’ve hijacked the thread, that wasn’t my intention (threads often deviate organically, which this one did after the actual subject fizzled out), can I suggest that you re-read the thread as I think that the only answers you’re going to get are there, the general consensus is that no one on this forum knows for sure. Also, your last words on the subject were “I’m convinced I’d be wasting my money” and “that does also seem to confirm my original theory that the practise is useless for improving SERP” so from my perspective the question has been answered to your satisfaction.
So, unless you have something to add, I think Felgall answering my questions would be beneficial to anyone else reading the thread, ok with you?
The second point that I made way back in post 2 is the most important consideration for getting extra domains - it prevents other people from obtaining those domains and setting up sites to compete with you. That makes getting the extra domains worthwhile regardless of any other impact that they have on getting genuine visitors to your site. Of course they will also bring extra visitors to your site simply by people typing in likely addresses in their browser. So you get a huge benefit from having the domains without even needing to consider how the search engines will treat them.
So you’re now saying that there aren’t any SEO considerations or is it that you’re sticking with your ‘very minor impact’ statement?
Fine, but can you please back it up with some knowledge you’ve gained from practical experience with this, or at the very least some linked sources that counter the sources I mentioned that suggest that domains do in fact have more than a minor impact, so far you’ve given us nothing but speculation which just confuses the issue.
Also, when do you plan to answer my questions? The SEO community on SP can only benefit from you doing that, ignoring them just makes you look like you don’t know the answers.
btw
