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Layman's Thinking
A Customer emailed me a question this morning, asking if it was easy to buy a handful of domain names and point them to their website. I answered yes and yes. I also said they should save their hard earned pennies because buying multiple domain names would make as much difference to their business as buying Boris Johnson a round of ice cream.
The Price Of A Name
You can download The Art of Search to your Kindle for £6.28 or you can register a .co.uk domain name for around £10.00 for one year. Your choice. The former will make me happy, thank you.
Google's Not Simple
Google is a business that's involved in the creation of self driving cars. It's a business that's mapped the globe, it can detect when and where there's been an accident and it can re-route you so that you can avoid the incident to get to your destination as soon as possible and leave the way clear for emergency vehicles to reach the incident faster.
Given this business that generates, farms and presents its interconnected data in this way, would you honestly think that you can fool or fox Google?
Our Customer's initial reasoning was sound, as there was no intention to buy multiple TLDs such as mycompany.co.uk - mycompany.com - mycompany.biz etc. but a desire to register domains that competitors had not thought to register such as theircompanyproduct.co.uk. I admire the lateral thought and, in order to evolve this line of enquiry, just needed to add a little bit of Google insight.
Google state that there are 200 things which they take into consideration when ranking a website. The domain is but one of these. If Google are telling us that they consider 200 things, then you can absolutely guarantee that they actually monitor 100s more signals than they may publicly suggest they use.
Gaming The System
Google's built a reputation for delivering accurate and valuable results (hyperlinks to websites) against any given search query. If you're hatching a notion of wasting your hard earned pennies on gaming the system then please don't; buy my book instead - it's cheaper than just one domain and will last a lifetime. Because the game you're trying to play here is thinking that you can fool Google with the registration of a few domain names. Google's not that foolish. It doesn't and it's never going to rely on just one signal such as a keyword in a domain name when calculating a website's significance and importance. This is a company that's building self-driving cars, it's one that's hardly likely to fall for a trick that some bloke down the pub is capable of suggesting you try.
The Holy Trinity
It's not about the words in your domain name - it's about the words on the page. It's all about earning Google's trust and writing into your website the words that your Customers would use to search for the things they want to achieve.
@theartofsearch