Do you recall the early days of the internet?.
On AOL Messenger, you could talk to your pals nonstop while playing solitaire on Yahoo Games. You were immediately blocked from the internet as soon as your mother picked up the phone to make a call. fun times
When shopping back then, there was a strong possibility you were doing it on a website with an exact match domain (EMD). For instance, you would most likely land on a website with the address www.buydogcollars.com if you required a dog collar.
When search engine optimization was still in its infancy, it was normal practise for businesses to include their precise target keyword phrase in the domain URL.
Unfortunately, scammers and bad actors took advantage of this (or perhaps luckily, depending on how you feel about EMDs), scooped up many of these domains, and linked them to subpar websites.
What then is current truth? Does the name of your domain affect search engine results?
Let’s examine the argument more closely.
The Question: Does Domain Name Affect Ranking?
Exact match domains used to be quite important.
The most expensive domain name ever purchased was CarInsurance.com, which sold for $49.7 million in 2010. So it’s obvious that domains containing that keyword were appreciated.
EMD advocacy was, and occasionally still is, a widespread practise among those working in the SEO sector. The main claims made about them are that they instantaneously produce credibility and a competitive edge.
However, do you recall the terrible guys we discussed in the previous section? Google eventually developed an understanding of their keyword-stuffing URLs and modified its algorithm to ignore them. But that does not imply that SEO is unaffected by the domain name of your website.
The Proof: How Domain Names Affect SEO
Regarding domain names and their effect on rankings, there is a lot of conflicting evidence.
There is little doubt that domain names once factored into rankings.
Software developer Matt Cutts from Google’s Search Quality department recognised the function of EMDs in the search algorithm in a 2011 Webmaster Hangout.
He added these words, though:
Thus, “we have been considering altering that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given two different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a number of terms in it,” the researcher said.
A year later, in 2012, Cutts tweeted that exact match domains with low quality would have less visibility in search results.
Finally, in 2020, John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, discovered that the ranks of websites in search engine results no longer depend on the keywords in domain names.
In response to a question about whether domain names with keywords affect rankings, he replied, “In short, no. An extra benefit like that is not provided by having a keyword in your top-level domain.
However, this does not imply that domain names are not significant. Simply put, they don’t directly affect rankings.
Our Opinion: Even though your domain name is not a ranking factor, it is still significant.