The effect of a domain name on Adsense revenue?

[dougyt]

Has anyone tested the effects of a domain name on adsense revenue?
That is to say, if you made say several niche focused sites all hosted in different folders on one domain, would they perform better on separate domains?
I believe it may make a difference to search engine rank having a domain which contains a keyword, but is that borne out by anyone here?

[imbrod]

This is theory, I also heard that.

But in the real world, if you have domain name ex. one-twoo-three.com, entering 'one two three' (without brackets) won't show your site in google (or it will, on page # 1732756). If you enter "one two three" (with brackets), you will be found, but who searches that way?

[flyer]

I think you answered a different question there.

Yes, the domain name can help you get a better position in SEs if it has your keywords in there. It also helps determine the subject of the ads you get. I've seen an ad triggered by a directory name alone.

[imbrod]

I believe it may make a difference to search engine rank having a domain which contains a keyword, but is that borne out by anyone here?

I was answering to this part of question, actually.

[PatLovell]

I have a couple of Nascar related sites and they rank well because of the names. Most of my sites will rank well on Yahoo and MSN because of the domain name. Google doesn't seem to put as much weight into this as the same sites that are on page one in yahoo and msn are much deeper in google for the same keywords.

Pat

[Syntheticore]

If you only have one domain name, you could create subdomains. For example,
http://niche.maindomain.com

This might help with the search engines, since it comes even before the domain name itself. I think this might be more efficient than just folders. But not all hosts give unlimited subdomains.

Also, just a tip... when picking a domain name, try to pick something like a number in the front or one of the first few letters of the alphabet. It usually helps to be listed first, in alphabetical order in directories and such.

[Sbabb]

I've read that Google ignores numbers and short words and I've seen search results from Google that tell me that it ignored some of my words because they were short or common, so it seems credible.

You may be able to use this to your advantage if you want a domainname that has your keywords in it, but it's already taken. For example, if you wanted nascar-poster-store.com and it was already taken, you could try a1-nascar-poster-store.com or 1st-nascar-poster-store.com or nascar-poster-store-4u.com (I see the "4u" on domains all the time and it bugs me for some reason) and the theory is that Google will ignore the short words and the words with numbers in them and you'll get the benefit of the "nascar poster store" keyword phrase in your domain name.


Scott

[BigBizBlog]

One problem with variations of domain names - you'll need to by more domains to be safe.

For instance, if you use a '4' for 'for', you best get both variations, so no one can capitalize on your traffic (get time4dinner.com and timefordinner.com, for example).

And if you use hyphens, definitely get the non-hyphen version as well - if a person leaves them out, then they'll send traffic to the non-hyphen one.