The power of high quality incoming links for search engine rankings
Category: Domaining, Google, Link Baiting, Link Building, SEO, Social Networking
A case study:
You hear it and see it all the time in the domaining industry. A hyphen in a domain will decrease the value of that domain name and search engines often devalue hyphenated domains as these are often ‘copycat domains’ or 2nd grade content domains. Although I agree this is true in some cases, it does not hold true all the time. But it forms the basis for a nice experiment!
Lets look at an extreme case of a hyphenated domain name: d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com
I came across this hyphenated domain and just had to share :)
Being a terrible speller, I often use Google for checking words to get the correct spelling.
Now try to do a search for the term definitely and you will see at the number one spot the domain: d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com
Now check out the content on the site :) Pretty nifty trick!
Some facts:
- d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com has only one page
- The domain was created on feb 14, 2007 (so one year old)
- The word ‘definitely’ is searched for 600+ times per month.
- And here is the juice: It has 164 incoming links displayed by Google and 7,232 by Yahoo!
Notice the Digg It in the bottom left! This is why the domain is ranking so well even though it has hyphens all the way through it. This is Link Baiting and the use of social networking to present an interesting topic/story/case study like this one so that people will link back to it both via the social networks but also via their blogs of social network profiles.
So even the the site is fully hyphenated, only one page with very little content to talk of, only one year old, it can rank number one for the main term it targets. Being a .com certainly helps also!
Interestingly, it does not rank for any of the alternative spellings on the page.
And look at the title tag: (even the very important title tag does not contain the keyword ‘definitely’)
<d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y>
And I saw this person clone the idea with one of the alternate spellings using the exact same template and social media technique: d-e-f-i-n-e-t-l-y.com ( http://www.google.com/search?q=definetly ) … he already has 6 digs :)
Isnt it copyright infringement if someone uses your domain name and puts in a hyphen?
Not necessarily. It would only be a copyright infringement if the term was protected by copyright in the first place. I believe for domains it is Trademarks and not copyright (thats more for the contents). If a term is trademarked and you register the hyphenated equivalent domain (eg microsoft.com and micro-soft.com) then you will loose this domain pretty fast. But for generic terms that are not trademarked like the one above there is no problem at all and you are free to place hyphens in a generic term and rank above the none hyphenated domain even.