Interesting

Hi all,

I get the SiteProNews newsletter. I found todays very interesting. It covers some basics, but a couple of finds contradict what i thought, so i thought it may be useful to others. I'd be interested to hear anyones comments too. Here it the main content:

Domains and URLs:
Search Engine Ranking
By James D. Brausch

Recently we performed large statistical analysis of the top ranking sites and studied the domain names and URLs to see if we could find any correlation. Over 20,000 listings were examined for 110 separate factors and the results tabulated and statistically analyzed.
This article discusses the three attributes of domains and URLs that were found most often among the top ranked sites.

Does having the keyword (ie: search term) in the domain name
affect ranking?

Yes:- This was the factor that was found most consistently among the top ranking sites. Since this single factor was found so consistently among the top ranking sites, we strongly recommend that you choose a domain name which contains your major keyword. Our own domain doesn't follow this rule, but you can bet that we are considering moving to a domain which does include our keywords now that we have reviewed the findings of this

Does having a URL shorter than average affect ranking?

We found consistently that shorter URLs ranked better. This is an interesting factor since you can largely control the length of your URLs without moving to a new domain. Were you already considering a restructure/redesign of your current site? Consider using short directory names and filenames.

Your domain name is also a factor in the length of your URL. At one time, many search engine optimization experts were recommending purchasing very long domain names with lots of keywords separated by dashes. The results of this study indicate that would be bad advice. Instead, focus on short domain names which contain your main keyword and short URLs.

Does having a "/" at the end of your URL affect ranking?

This is one of the most interesting findings. We actually began by studying lots of page types (.html, .htm, .asp, .shtml, .sht, etc.). Our data kept showing that we were missing a large percentage of the top ranking pages by just looking at those file types. We were puzzled at first. Everyone knows that .html is the most common ending to URLs; right? Wrong!

Actually, we found that most top ranking pages end with a reference to a directory, not an actual .html file. For instance, we found the following:

www.domain.com/test/ - This was the structure we found most often among the top ranked sites.

www.domain.com/test.html - This structure was more likely to be found among the lower ranked sites.

We think this is a key find. If you are considering a restructure of your site, you might want to consider renaming test.html to index.html and placing it in a subdirectory called "test".

Let's talk about some of the factors that were found among the lower ranking sites in higher frequency than in higher ranking sites... In other words; the "bad" factors.

Does having a ".net" domain affect ranking?

We expected many top-level domains to possibly rank lower than the standard ".com" domains. What we found surprised us. Many domain endings that we expected would rank lower seemed instead to be more-or-less equally distributed among the high and low ranking sites.

We never expected the ".net" domains to be ranked lower, but that is what the data suggests. In fact it is a very strong correlation. We used to think that a ".net" domain was almost as good as a ".com" domain. We will now avoid them.

Does having a ".sht" URL affect ranking?

This is an interesting find. We used to have many sites with this extension. Everyone is familiar with ".html" files; right? You may have also seen ".shtml" files. The ".shtml" extension is often used to denote a file that should have Server Side Includes (known as SSI) processed prior to serving the page. It used to be common to use the ".sht" extension interchangably with the ".shtml" extension in much the same way as ".htm" is used interchangably with ".html"

Warning! In our 20,000+ survey of sites listed by the top search engine, we found zero sites with a ".sht" extension. This seems to show that the top search engine does not list ".sht" files at all!

Does having a ".html" URL affect ranking?

This is really just the opposite finding as one of the findings among sites that rank higher. Since URLs ending in a "/" are found so often among the top ranking sites, it turns out that URLs ending in the standard ".html" are among the lower ranking.

In fact, this file extension seemed to be even more associated with lower ranking sites than ".shtml", ".htm" and ".asp". Prior to this report, we considered the ".html" at the end of a URL to be the most common and desirable. THis study has changed our mind about this as well.