Google’s “Search Off the Record” is a monthly podcast for behind-the-scenes looks at the company and its inner search workings. In last month’s episode, Google veterans John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Martin Splitt addressed domain names and their impact on organic search rankings.
Here are a few takeaways.
Google’s “Search Off the Record” is a monthly podcast.
The Google team emphasized domain names are a business decision with no direct impact on organic search rankings. Choosing a domain name is the first and most important step in starting a site because it reflects a brand’s identity.
Moreover, Google says it ignores keywords in a domain. But I’ve seen many weak websites that rank well seemingly because they have keywords in the domain. I suspect this is because people often link to websites using the domain name as an anchor text. The keywords appear in the link text of external backlinks, and Google still seems to use keywords in anchor texts as a strong ranking signal.
Nonetheless, brand-focused domain names are best in my experience, for these reasons:
In short, brand-focused domain names are long-term investments. A keyword-rich domain means prioritizing organic search over other channels and, potentially, long-term growth.
Google’s John Mueller advises against letting Google access your “Coming soon” page because once Google crawls an empty page, it may not crawl it in the foreseeable future, if ever.
“Coming soon” pages are useful for marketing to generate buzz and raise interest among prospects. But block those pages from Google via a Robots.txt file.
Including the “World Wide Web” prefix in a domain in another longstanding SEO debate. Google doesn’t care if the prefix is there, provided the use is consistent. Pick a version and then redirect the other to it.
And be sure to claim both URLs in Search Console. Better yet, add a DNS record to that domain at your registrar for both versions (“www” and not) and both protocols (“https” and “http”).
This was not discussed in the episode, but it’s included in Google’s documentation and relevant to choosing domain names. Google shows site names in search results. When it doesn’t know the site’s name, Google will show the domain.
To help Google know your site name, use the “WebSite” schema structured data type that includes your site’s home page and name. Here’s example code from Google.
Google’s documentation lists other preferred tactics for brand names:
Share this article:
Copyright © 2005 – 2024. Practical Ecommerce® is a registered trademark of Confluence Distribution, Inc.