June 10th, 2007
Domain Names and SEO
Andrew Wee has recently blogged about domain monetization explaining the potential of acquiring domain names for affiliate marketing. He also highlights that .com names are not always the best. That brings me to share the relationship of domain names and Search Engine Optimization today 
No other domain extension can rank better than .COMs
Wrong. Search Engine does not give advantages to .com names, they basically rank pages according to content relevancy and importance. To illustrate my point, query Google for the term, ‘PageRank Checker’ and check out the first site.
Should I use hyphens or underscore when choosing domain names?
It is advisable to use hyphens in domain names or URLs because they are considered as words separator by most search engines. Refer to the this blog post by Matt Cutts, who is one of the Google Engineer.
Links from .edu will boost your rank greatly
Another myth. Search Engines do not give greater weigh for receiving links from .edu sites. The reason why these links help in Search Engine Result Position (SERP) is simply because .edu pages normally have more sites linking to them because of their authority. This applies for .gov sites as well. Refer to the following video for a clarification by Matt Cutts (a Google Engineer) on this issue.
Matt Cutts clarification on .gov links [later part of video]
Popularity: 7% [?]
