Back in 2008 in a post about best practices for URL structure, we alluded to our preference to separate words in URLs with dashes or hyphens instead of the very common;l used underscore. We wrote that underscores (www.domain.tld/red_widgets.htm) cause search engines to see the words in the page name as redwidgets, but if you use dashes (www.domain.tld/red-widgets.htm) the search engines recognize and index the two separate words, red and widgets.

Google has just released a video explaining the historical rationale for that, why it’s still true, and why it’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Watch the explanation by Google’s Matt Cutts.

Renee Shupe, the Redhead Virtual Assistant, recently ranted about the dangers of using free web hosting sites for a business website. Of particular note are these:

• Your site is a sub-domain at the hosting site. So instead of MyGreatSite.com, you become MySite.FreeWebHosting.com. That’s a killer for SEO.
• Most of these require advertising on your pages. That’s likely to either be ads for stuff that’s totally irrelevant to you business or (worse yet!) ads for competitors.
• You have little control over the look & feel of your site — you’re  forced to use their templates (some are just horrible-looking).
• You lose rights to your site — if they shut down their service or go out of business, you don’t have a copy of your site that you can put up elsewhere.

Never skimp on your web hosting. Select a reputable hosting provider who will protect your interests in your web site and provide full value. Ask us to recommend some.

Matt Cutts (“The Google Guy”) spoke at an industry meeting a few months ago, and as reported by Search Engine Land, there was news in what he had to say. Here are the most important points to note, in our opinion:

• Spam reports now get 4 times as much priority as before in the spam queue at Google. If your competitors are using spammy SEO techniques, it can’t hurt to report them. (Your competitors can report you, too, of course, so remember to avoid black hat SEO tactics yourself.) And if you find really spammy web sites like link farms and MFA sites showing up for your keywords, by all means report them to Google.
• Users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He suggested you put your most important links at the top of the page. They may not count more for SEO purposes, but will help in driving visitors to click on the links, especially call-to-action links that encourage visitors to buy.
• Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well. For example, if you have a site at www.blue-widgets.com it may rank too well for the keyword phrase blue widgets. Expect the importance of keywords in your domain name to be reduced. We’ve always encouraged different criteria for choosing your domain name.
• When doing Keyword research, start with keywords your customer base is likely to use, and avoid industry jargon. The rule of thumb is called Ask 10 Taxi Drivers (meaning people NOT in the same business as yours).

Two cautionary notes here about protecting your domain name.

Make Sure You Own Your Own Domain Name

You need to be listed as the Registrant (owner) of your domain name. Otherwise your business is at the mercy of someone else.

Case in point: a client of ours has had their domain name (roughly equal to their company name) for the past 3 years. They had the person who hosts their web site register it for them. Now that they’re thinking of moving to a different hosting service, they find they can’t access their domain to do that because they’re not the registrant. Their web hosting company is the registrant.

Irritated to be losing a customer, the web hosting company wants a sizable monetary payment to relinquish ownership of the domain name — so much that our client feels the need to hire a lawyer and sue to get possession.

Not sure if you own your domain? Go to www.whois-search.com and enter your domain. You should be listed as both the Registrant and the Administrative Contact. If you’re not, ask whoever is listed as the registrant to make that change for you. Do it before you have any sort of falling out with them.

Don’t Let Your Domain Name Expire

Beware Domain Squatters or Cybersquatters. A client of ours had a compelling domain name and hadn’t started to use it yet, but it was the perfect domain name for his business. Sadly, he forgot to renew it one year. and the registrar he’d used neglected to tell him it was expiring. By the time he noticed, and wanted to use it for his website, he discovered that a cybersquatter had registered it themselves, and wanted a premium payment to give it up. Our client had to spend $2,000 just to get their domain name back.

Whoever you use as a domain registrar, always make sure they give you plenty of notice when it’s time to renew.

Don’t make either of these costly mistakes!

Matt Cutts, “The Google Guy”, has released a video addressing a misconception many SEO consultants had about the effects of domain expiration. The expiration date of your domain name regtistration had been believed to be a ranking factor for your web site.

Search engines don’t want to give prominent listings to websites that may be “flash in the pan” websites that exist for a few months or a year and then go away. It was believed that if you register your domain name for at least two or three years, the search engines would conclude that you are in business for the long haul and consider you eligible for higher rankings.

That belief was based on a provision in one of Google’s patents, but Matt says this is not a ranking factor and you shouldn’t worry about it having any effect on your overall search engine optimization.

Watch the Matt Cutts video.

Buying up lots of domain names that are vaguely similar to your primary domain is common practice and lots of online business owners will have a stash of domains that they have invested in rather than simply buying just one.

In most cases where clients simply want to have multiple domains with keyword variations in the domain name, we usually suggest that’s not an effective strategy. But there are some valid reasons for registering multiple domain names.

Search Marketing Standard lists four specific reasons it might make sense to do so:

1. Owning multiple domains can lead to more traffic
2. Owning certain domain variations can be a strategic decision
3. They can help you leverage domain complaints or domain reviews
4. Multiple domains can handle misspellings of your domain

See the article in Search Marketing Standard for an elaboration of each of those.

We’ve had some fun in the past, pointing out “unfortunate” domain name choices … a couple of times. Clearly, having a good domain name is important for your business. For awhile it was the rage to create many web sites, with each domain name using a different keyword phrase for your business. Having  keywords in your domain name are substantially less helpful now.

How do you select a good domain name? Well, I have a modest list of rules that should guide you through the process.

1. Make it easy to remember.
   You want people to return to your web site, right? They’re not going to search for you every timne; they’ll just type it in. So keep it easy to remember.
2. Make it hard to misspell.
   There are web sites out there with common misspellings of domain names, lurking either to download malware onto a user’s computer or to entice the user to click on a Google AdSense ad. (www.bink.com is an example of a common misspelling used that way.)
3. Choose a .com name for your business.
   If the domain name you want is already taken, it may be tempting to register the same domain name but with a .info or .biz extension instead. Most people, though will type in .com at the end out of sheer habit. That’s bad enough if the .com version is an unrelated website, but if the .com version points to a competitor, you’re sending customers to them.
4. Avoid hyphens.
   People never quite remember whether to use the hyphen or not … or just where in your domain name the hyphen belongs.
5. Finally, shorter is better than longer.
   You always want it to be as easy as possible for people to do business with you. Don’t make them type in a long, complicated domain name. First of all, that’s likely to cause you to violate rules 1 & 2, but also, you don’t want to make it more difficult than it has to be to enter your address in a browser’s address bar.

You may realize that if you enter a URL like rankmagic.com into your browser you get to the same page as when you enter www.rankmagic.com. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you do it. But for the search engines, it can make a difference.

Background

The WWW refers to the World Wide Web, which many people consider to be synonymous with the Internet. Technically, it’s not. The WWW runs on the internet like email, but is not the Internet itself. The “www” part of an Internet address isn’t usually required, though, so you normally can use it or not when typing a URL into the address bar of your browser.

Search Engine Implications

Search engines see addresses with and without the “www” as separate addresses. Why should that matter? Because link popularity is an essential factor in good ranking and use of the “www” can affect your link popularity. Here’s how:

Suppose you have 100 links pointing to http://example.com and another hundred links pointing to http://www.example.com. Search engines will see that each URL has 100 inbound links, and that’s all you’ll get credit for. However, if they all pointed to http://www.example.com you’d get credit for all 200 links.

It can actually be worse than that, as it’s possible to have four different URLS for your home page like this:

1. example.com
2. www.example.com
3. example.com/index.html
4. www.example.com/index.html

This problem of multiple addresses for the same web page is called canonicalization. We have a full discussion of it on our web site.

What To Do?

You can’t control how other people link to your site and whether they use the “www” in the address or not. But you can set up a permanent redirect so that any time they don’t use the “www”, the link gets directed to the “www” version of your web address. We have instructions on how to fix your home page canonical issues on our web site.

Aside from redirecting external links to the “www” version of your address, you should also make sure your internal links pointing to your home page do the same. It’s very common for home page links from other pages on your site to include the actual page, as in www.example.com/index.html (there are several possible alternatives to index.html that your site may use). You should make sure that  your own links to your home page don’t include that “index.html” part, and just point to www.example.com.

Read more about that pesky “www” and canonicalization here.

Your domain name registration tells the search engines something you may not realize.

Search engines are looking for reliable websites. They don’t want to give prominent listings to websites that may be “flash in the pan” websites that exist for a few months or a year and then go away. If you register your domain name for at least two or three years (you can go up to ten years at a time), the search engines may conclude that you are in business for the long haul and consider you eligible for higher rankings. It’s also a good idea to renew your domain name registration before you get too close to the expiration date. We suggest renewing before your expiration date is a year away.

Google has mentioned this in a patent application, but we don’t know how much weight it carries. Whether other search engines look at this is only conjecture. Matt Cutts, “the Google Guy”, has downplayed the importance in a brief video. We agree that this is probably of relatively little importance (certainly it’s less important than on-page content and incoming links) but it’s a relatively cheap and easy thing to address. At the very worst, it can’t hurt.

We get asked about this on a regular basis: Shouldn’t I get multiple domain names for the different parts of my business and create a bunch of one-page web sites with discrete content, all linking to the main web site? Surprisingly to most people who ask this, it’s a very bad idea.

You can do it, but don’t expect to get improved rankings or traffic from this approach. Creating multiple cookie-cutter web sites is a trick the search engines have been wise to for years. Those little, single-purpose web sites will seldom if ever develop the link popularity necessary for them to be truly competitive for high rankings in the search engines. The only benefit is if for some reason you think people are typing those domains into their browser address bar.

It’s almost always better to have all that unique content in separate pages on your main website and skip the little “doorway” web sites. (Similar doorway pages got the German-language web site for BMW totally banned from Google for more than six months a couple of years ago.)

This is a black hat SEO trick that’s not going to get you better SERP visibility.