best-red-widgets.com

red-widgets-forsale.com

redwidgets-bestones.com

And…if you could get the exact match domain (www.redwidgets.com), meaning the domain name is exactly the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for with no dashes or any other words etc…all the better!  That would REALLY help.

Our real world experience though, has shown this to not be true.  In our tests, domains with the keyword phrase in them and even the exact match domains (except for one circumstance) did not perform better for us than ones that we optimized for keywords that were not included in the domain name.

We wanted to see if analyzing some pretty massive amounts of data would support our observations.  We looked at over 5 million keywords from our IMeye database, and we looked at the top 10 domains in the search engine listings for each.  Here’s what we found:

• only 5% of the keywords had a domain in the top 10 with the keyword phrase in it
• only 5% of the keywords had a domain in the top 10 that was an exact match

Conclusions?  keyword in the domain is not really all that important, as 95% of the time, they don’t even make it into the top 10.  In addition, exact match domains don’t appear to be any “stronger” than simply having the keyword phrase in the domain name.

There is one circumstance that makes it clear in our tests that exact match domains do make a large difference.  We’ve found that with VERY VERY low competition, an exact match domain can rank very quickly.  We’re working on some studies to show that with this data right now.

But, it’s pretty clear to us…that having the keyword phrase in the domain name is really just not that important to SEO efforts.  I’m guessing…it’s all about those backlinks !

Certainly things are changing, and this will have some effect, but we need to focus on what it actually does.

In my mind it does two things.  First, it “steers” people towards a certain keyword phrase over others.  This has obvious implications on search volumes.  Some of your targets will get more, others will get less.  Could be good , bad, or indifferent for you.  It has zero impact on who shows up for a given phrase though.  So, my take away is watch your stats and see if certain keyword phrases are falling out of “favor”, then you may have to adjust your SEO towards other phrases.

Example:  I checked one of our ecommerce sites.  We target “widgets” and “widgets for sale ” among others.  As I typed in widgets, my eyes scanned directly to widgets for sale.  Now, this actually ends up being better for us as we rank higher for that.  But…I just need to watch the stats and perhaps move SEO resources form “widgets” to “widgets for sale”

The second thing it will do is expand the “horizons” of searchers.  It may very well increase searches as people go after the initial term they were looking for … as well as others they see presented to them.  This, in general is probably good for us as advertisers (organic or paid).  We may have more chances than before to put our message in front of potential buyers.  Again, I think the key is to watch the stats and see if traffic starting to show up for other terms.  You may need to modify your SEO targets due to this as well.

What’s less clear to me right now is the impact on adwords.  Stand by as we try to unravel that.

Check out this very balanced blog post for some more insight into SEO not being dead!

Thank you so much for putting your confidence in us!

Niche Blueprint 2.0

With the help of our team and 3 great translators from our Forum, we got the job done in record time.

I’m thrilled with how they came out and thriled with the vote of confidence from Clickbank.

Here’s the press release

Thanks to Brett, Cindy, Paul, and Danny for all their hard work!

It’s a change to the algorithms that will have some sites see improvements in their search engine rankings…and others..well, not so much.

Wouldn’t it be great to see what’s going to happen?

Well..an enterprising individual has created a great tool that will allow you to type in a keyword phrase and compare where you are now…and where you’ll be once caffeine is rolled out.

Grab the tool here

QUICK UPDATE: This is not Google’s caffeine sandbox that was turned off, this uses the results from one data center where Google has confirmed that caffeine has been rolled out to.

How is the economic slow down hurting Internet marketing businesses ?

I’ve always answered that I’d rather be in an online business than a brick and mortar.  I can be so flexible with my business and advertising strategies…AND, it always seems like the one area of retail growth is online spending..even in an economic downturn.

Well…that’s happened again.  In a time where all spending is down.  Online retail spending for black Friday was up 11% year over year (Thanksgiving day spending was up 10%)

These are not trivial numbers for sure.

Online remains a great place to be during hard economic times AND good ones.

Source: ComScore

This information is taken straight from the mouths of Google engineers.

There is no “duplicate content” penalty.  Full stop.

Here are the two times when it becomes a concern.

1.  If you have a duplicate piece of content that is in two places and you’re trying to rank both of them for the same keyword phrase…one will likely not show up in the SERPS.  No penalty…no sandbox for the “offending” site (whichever one that could be!).  They just don’t want to show the same thing multiple times in the SERPS.  Google recognizes there are good reasons for duplicate content on the web…so there’s no witch hunt here, just an effort to make the SERPS more useful.  The example that the Google engineers used was as follows:

If you do a search on “fuzzy bunnies” and there is a wikipedia entry, plus the print formatted version of a wikipedia entry…only the first one will be shown.  However, if you did a search on “fuzzy bunnies print version” or something like that…the print version would only be shown.  Common sense really, and how you and I would design a search engine.

2.  The other time that we need to be concerned about duplicate content is when Google “senses” an effort to “spam”.  That could be the exact same article posted on 1000’s of sites simply to get traffic or to get backlinks.  When they detect that, they will usually simply “de-value” the links from these sources.  That’s it…no death sentence for any site !

In my opinion and based on information straight from Google’s mouth…these two scenarios are the only ones we need to be worried about with re: to duplicate content.

For reference : Video of Google Engineer discussing this

Everyone has a theory, but not a lot of people have hard data…until right now that is.

We are quietly building a massive research tool that will allow us to do Internet marketing research like no one has ever done before.

It will literally be game changing..and you’ll hear about it sometime after the Holidays. You’ll also be able to get access to the data yourself…to do your own research…but…more about that later.

We have already been doing some initial analysis and we wanted to share some very interesting Web 2.0 stats with you.

We looked at approximately 60,000 “popular” internet marketing keywords (we’ll explain our population samples better in the future…when we’re ready to share more about our research tool, but suffice to say that these are random keywords that have at least some kind of marketing value…i.e. not “chair” or something like that!)…to see what the level of penetration was for web 2.0 platforms in the top 10 Google results.

Interesting fact #1 - 15% of all keywords had an Ezine article in the top 10 listings!

Interesting fact #2 - Excluding Ezine articles, roughly 7% of the keywords had at least 1 web 2.0 platform in the top 10 listings.

Interesting fact #3 - Squidoo, Hubpages, youtube, and facebook all had about the same penetration (roughly 2.5% of the keywords) … Wordpress.com, typepad, dig, and scribed were about 1/2 of those…coming in at about 1-1.25% of the keywords.

Interesting fact #4 - blogspot.com was the big winner. For a keyword that has a web 2.0 platform in the top 10 organic results, it’s almost 3x more likely to be blogspot.com than anything else!

Conclusions ?

Well…I’ve always had a lot of respect for the potential traffic from an Ezine article…but, perhaps not THAT much respect. It’s a pretty amazing statistic…and the first conclusion…is that Ezine should become an even more serious part of your marketing efforts.

In Addition, obviously…if you want to use a web 2.0 platform to enter the SERPS…seems like it’s a no brainer to use blogspot.com … owned by Google of course…but, I’m certain that has nothing to do with it.

Keep in mind, If you’re just looking for backlinks, any of these web 2.0 platforms remain sources…this analysis is only if you want to rank the page you’ve created.

Stay tuned for more fun…and an incredible wealth of research that will help you make money.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at even more keywords…and perhaps break down the penetration of Web 2.0 platforms by the number of competing pages…? (evil laugh) Oh..there will be so much more!

UPDATE

Someone asked for stats re: goarticles and articledashboard.

As I suspected…articledashboard was practically non existent , and goarticles was about 1/10 of Ezine

Here’s a guy making money already from the stuff we’re GIVING away prior to our Commission Blueprint 2.0 Launch.

Never gets old…helping people make money online…never.

All the prelaunch vids are up…now it’s just a matter of waiting to go live.  I hate this part…I want to launch now!

Check them out here if you haven’t yet!