Sites Linking to Yours - Importance of their domain name

[Sebastian]

Hey folks,

I seem to be having some good results with this. Say you site is on dog training, say you own superdogtraining.com, and want to rank for these keywords.

It seems Google would factor in the domain name of the sites linking to yours to measure relevance ?

Say you get links from dogster.com, dogtrainingschool.com, dogtrainingmethod.com etc...

Google scans the page linking to you to calculate the relevance, but does the domain name hold special weight ? If not too much, then how about the weight they have when you get a link from the homepages of such domains (which I have been getting)

Thank

[themike537]

I'd say it's a decently important factor, because it's a pretty clear indicator of what the page is about. A page about dogs linking to your dog page is worth a bit, and if the other site's domain is dogs.com that is obviously an indicator that the site is related.

[Michael Martinez]

It may or may not be a helpful factor, but unfortunately gut instinct doesn't prove anything. I can think of a lot of reasons for why a keyword-branded domain might pass significant value. None of them require that a search engine place particular emphasis on the occurrence of the keyword in the domain name -- other factors would provide a combined value.

But it's not an idea that can be completely dismissed out of hand. Skepticism disproves nothing.

Still, if you're looking for high-value links, you probably want to look at other factors as well, especially how many top rankings you can confirm a site has for related expressions.

By "confirm" I mean you find the site in the top five for the expression for each of several weeks (checking rankings on a daily basis is a waste of time).

This is a derivative-based metric of value, based on the assumption that if a site really has value then it should rank well for a group of related expressions.

If a site only ranks for its own name (if even that), you might consider getting some "early links" from the site in the hope that it matures to accrue and confer greater value.

[Sebastian]

Still, if you're looking for high-value links, you probably want to look at other factors as well, especially how many top rankings you can confirm a site has for related expressions.

Thanks for this reply Michael -

It would be interesting to see if any top affiliates/seos in this forum have had experiences which confirm the two hypotheses made in this thread:

1/ Importance of the domain names of the sites linking to you.
2/ Importance of SERP placement of the sites linking to you, as it relates to the keywords you are targeting.

[themike537]

Was a little drunk when I posted last night so let me rephrase lol:

A site's SERPs are a far more important indicator of their link value. I believe domain is more of a coincidental thing, because if a site is dogs.com it's probably a good site about dogs, so the link will be valuable because of the site being good and about dogs, not necessarily because its domain is dogs.com.

[Mr-AJ]

I guess that it's almost impossible to find out. Because if a site is linking to you it already has some backlinks and content and we all know that this plays a big role. To test it you need very special setups. For instance setting up a domain without content and backlinks and put a link to your site and check out ranking improvements. Or you have two similar sites with pretty similar content and backlink profiles but with different domains (keyword heavy and non keyword heavy domain). This might work. I've made good experiences with setting up mini sites with keyword heavy domains that are linking to you.

[Sebastian]

A site's SERPs are a far more important indicator of their link value. I believe domain is more of a coincidental thing

Interesting, thanks. I would tend agree with that. I can see SERPs being more important than domain names, because the former is Google's understanding of the theme and the latter is beyond their control, it could be anything that the webmaster chooses.

[Trikkur]

I don't think domain name really helps. I'll gladly take a link from jibberish-named Google or Yahoo than a link from dogtrainingschool.com

While this is a bit extreme scenario, I think it still proves my point that domain name is a lot less relevant than other factors you should be considering.

[MJ]

I think the point here is the content you are linked from trumps the domain name.

[Andrew Scherer]

No I dont think the domain has much importance. Link profile and content is more important.