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Detailed domain analysis for successful SEO promotion from A to Z
Hello! This is a test article for Baden 1! In the article we will deal with the issue of purchasing a domain for SEO promotion - how to choose a domain, what to pay attention to and other nuances of purchasing a website address for successful promotion. At first glance, everything seems simple, but this is not so, because it often happens that you buy a seemingly new address, but in fact you have already used it before, about 5 years ago and not only used it, but catastrophically ruined its history by making further promotion is impossible and such cases are not uncommon, only often the site owners cannot understand what is going on. In this article we will look at how to choose a domain name for a website, how to check the domain history in detail so as not to ruin all further work, as well as how to link a domain to hosting and much more.
Let's start from the very beginning for those who do not understand Internet technologies at all and talk about what a domain is and why it is needed. If you already know this information, you can immediately go to the chapter - analysis and verification.
What is a domain and what do you eat it with?
A site’s domain is its address on the network, which allows you to access the site not by entering the IP address of the server on which it is located, which would not be very convenient, but by entering a short and memorable sequence of characters, which often speaks for itself, for example - mvideo.ru or bags.rf
The site name is unique within the Internet, that is, each address exists in a single copy. By specifying a DNS record, the domain is linked to the hosting on which the site is located. DNS records can be changed at the owner’s discretion at any time, so it often happens that a year ago it pointed to a refrigerator store, but today it points to a bag store.
Names can also be glued into a group, when when specifying one address, automatic redirection to another occurs and there can be an infinite number of such addresses. Great example:
- gogle.com
- google.com
- gooogle.com
All these addresses are glued to the main Google address. So we figured out the question of what a website domain is - nothing complicated, right?
Addressing levels
Simplified levels can be divided into three groups:
- first level domain
- second level domain
- third level domain
First-level addresses include names like .ru, .com, .net, etc.
That is, there is only 1 first-level address for each zone and for the ru zone it is www.ru
It is noteworthy that it is currently for sale:
And it costs a little more than 8,000,000 rubles
Also informative information is contained in the WHOIS record of the root address:
In general, you understand about the root address!
Second-level domains are the majority of domains known to us, for example www.site. This is exactly the domain we will buy to create and promote the site.
The third level is under a domain from the second level and can look like this - dev.www.site Most hosting allows you to create a huge number of third-level domains. Previously, when setting up Direct, they used to create hundreds of subdomains to add words from the key query to the site address so that they would be highlighted in the results, then the technology lost its relevance after the function was entered into Direct display link.
Once we have decided what a domain is, it is worth answering the pressing question - how much does a domain cost?
About the cost
The cost of a domain depends on its zone and registrar and can vary from 66 rubles for domain.ru (the cheapest I’ve seen) and up to 760,000 rubles for a new address without history, according to NIC.RU:
On average, the cost of RU is about 300 rubles with a subsequent renewal of about 600 rubles per year, but you can find it cheaper.
The next step is checking the domain for availability.
Employment check
You can check whether the selected address is currently available on the website of any registrar.
If the address is free, you can immediately buy it; if it is busy, look at the WHOIS data and find out the date of possible release, as well as find out the administrator’s contacts for communication. Checking the selected name:
As you can see, checking a free domain is not at all difficult!
Purchasing a website address
After checking to see if the domain is available, it’s time to buy it. When answering the question of where to buy a domain, I would advise you to use Rucenter in order to avoid possible problems in the future if you suddenly have to transfer it or transfer it to another person, because You can buy a domain from many registrars much cheaper, but transferring it will not always be easy.
How to Choose a Domain Name for SEO
Gradually we came to one of the most interesting points of this article - how to choose the best domain for SEO.
One of the important factors in ranking sites is the content of the keyword or part of it in the address, but this factor will not have the slightest significance if the address has a bad history, and it is completely impossible to determine it by eye. Selecting a domain based on keywords is of course important, but it is not a fundamental factor. You can be sure that you are buying a new address with a clean WHOIS history, but this will not be the case. When a name is transferred from one registrar to another, its history is erased, as if it were pristine, and often this is done on purpose. As I wrote above, it often happens that you buy a domain, but it already has a bad search history and no matter what you do with such an address in terms of SEO, the result will be zero. And this the most important factor What you should pay attention to when purchasing is a detailed study of history.
If the address contains a keyword or part of it, this will, of course, give a certain bonus, but this factor is insignificant in comparison with the history of the domain.
Another important nuance - should you use the name that your old resource already had? Often clients come to me who already have an existing, old website, but promotion is not going well. And all the stones are thrown into the garden of a bad website, they say, let’s remake the website, put it in order, optimize it for search engines and leave the old domain and promotion will go uphill, but often this is not the case at all. The address may already be thoroughly damaged, and it is this, and not a bad website, that is the critical obstacle to successful promotion. A detailed study of the history of the name, the history of purchasing links and indexing allows us to make a more or less adequate conclusion about the suitability of the address for further promotion. If the domain is valid, first of all we will be interested in such factors as the historical dynamics of transitions from search engines, because it happens that at a certain moment it was Google that lost a lot of traffic - in this case, it is advisable to use a different domain for the new site, because Google filters take a very long time and getting out of them has many difficulties, and the bonus from the age of the domain here is zero. Also, special attention should be paid to the anchor list - if it is spam, you should think twice. We will talk more about domain analysis in this article below!
Analysis and history
The first step is to study the historical data for the domain. You can check the age of a domain on the webarchive service.
This service stores data about the majority of more or less visited projects from all corners of the network, and here we can see which site was previously hosted on the domain and even look at it. Let's take, for example, my project www.site and move on
Here we will see a graph with dates:
By selecting the year and date, we can see the site that was recorded by the Webarchive crawler when crawling at that time, for example, my blog has undergone 2 redesigns during its existence and we can see all this. Below is my blog from 2014:
And here is my blog in 2011:
When analyzing a domain, it is very important for us to look at the history of project changes in search of possible problems, which can easily include a change in the theme of the site, for example, if previously it was a resource for selling refrigerators, and you are planning to open a website for legal services, this is not a good idea, although Still, this is not critical. We will study the web archive in search of gross violations of search engine doctrine such as hidden text, cloaking, horizontal foot wraps, in general, everything that could lead to the imposition of strong search engine filters. Also, if it turns out that the site previously sold links en masse, continuing to work with this address is an extremely dubious idea. If, when studying the Webarchive, no gross violations were noticed, we go further and look at the history of WHOIS changes, fortunately there are services that have such statistics. There are several such services, for example RDS, but it is paid. Among the free ones, I can recommend whoishistory - on the service, you just need to enter the address in the appropriate field and it will show the history of changes in owner records, while the official WHOIS check of the registrar will show that it is clean. Checking a domain name on the whoishistory service:
Not all resources can be verified by this service, so if it shows that the history of a domain is clear, it is not a fact that this is actually the case, so I advise you to check each domain using several sources. For example, I personally bought myself domain from 2010 with excellent history, which previously contained a project on the same topic that I posted on it, although it was sold for 600 rubles and according to Rucentr it was pristine.
If current checks do not reveal serious problems, we move on - the link history of the domain. This can be done using the 2 most powerful link analysis services:
We look at the dynamics of changes in the link profile - sharp humps, in principle, do not tell us anything terrible and we need to compare them with the historical dynamics of transitions from search engines, in particular Google, which we can get on the semrush service
Here's what the Google dynamics look like on this service for a resource that has no problems:
And here’s what the schedule for a project that definitely has problems with Google looks like:
I am not just writing that the problems in Google are a serious reason to think about the advisability of promoting this domain, because the number of visitors from this search engine is slightly less than the number of visitors from Yandex in absolute terms, and getting out of the filter often takes many years, which will become a serious obstacle on the way to full advancement. Here's what a Google filter exit graph might look like:
Therefore, in order to avoid serious problems, you should approach domain analysis very, very seriously. No amount of age will save you if the domain is blacklisted by the PS and this must be clearly understood.
Linking to hosting
The last question that will concern beginners is how to link a domain to hosting and why this is needed. Linking a domain to hosting uniquely determines the connection between the name of the site and the IP address of the server on which the site is located. As mentioned above, at any time a domain can be connected to any other site on the network, and the current connection is determined by the registered NS hosting addresses. To do this, in the settings on the registrar’s website where it was purchased, you must specify the addresses that the hosting sends to you at the time of registration. Using Rucentr as an example, it looks like this:
If you don’t know the dns of your hosting and it didn’t send them to you during registration, you should contact technical support and they will give them to you. If you bought a domain and hosting from the same project, everything is often registered automatically and all you have to do is upload the site. In any case, remember - hosting technical support is your friend and is always ready to help even in matters such as website transfer. Feel free to write about any question that arises, such as archiving and backup, solving problems with speed and accessibility, connecting Yandex or Google mail to a domain, and others.
By the way, if you need to turn to or Google, it’s quite easy to do this by following my advice. And the knowledge of search algorithms, described by me, will help promote and promote your site in these search engines.
Summary
Selecting a domain for SEO promotion is by no means the easiest task. Today I examined the issue of acquiring and analyzing a domain as broadly as possible - I hope the article turned out to be useful and interesting, and if so, subscribe to new blog articles. There will be many more interesting things ahead, I guarantee that I will be glad to see your comments!
Here's an interesting video for today:
Hello my dear readers. Today we will talk about the degree of influence of a domain (domain name and its zone) on the promotion of a resource. My blog already has an article about the influence of a keyword in a domain name on its promotion. Now I will tell you about general points that should be taken into account when choosing a domain at the stage of registering it (or purchasing it).
The influence of the domain zone on promotion
We will consider only those domain zones that are most popular in Russia:
.RU- national domain of the Russian Federation;
.RF- national domain of the Russian Federation, Cyrillic notation;
.SU- domain for the territory of the post-Soviet space;
.COM.RU- for commercial organizations operating on the territory of the Russian Federation;
.NET.RU- for web projects and organizations whose work is related to network technologies and operating in the Russian Federation;
.ORG.RU- for non-profit organizations located on the territory of the Russian Federation;
.MSK.RU, .SPB.RU- geodomains for Moscow and St. Petersburg;
.COM, .BIZ- for commercial organizations;
.NET- for projects related to network technologies;
.ORG- for non-profit and charitable organizations;
.INFO- information sites;
.ME, .NAME- personal domains.
The rule here is simple - try to follow the theme of the selected zone. I can tell you from experience that this has some impact, albeit small. But search ranking is a whole complex of factors, and you shouldn’t give up on what you can easily do.
Keyword in domain name
I covered this topic in the corresponding post:
Briefly: for now Such domains allow you to quickly rank high in search results, but this factor is far from decisive eventually. This applies to both Yandex and Google.
The influence of the age of the site on its promotion
Currently, the age of a site has an important impact on its ranking in search results. But there is one point here. This influence is more indirect. That is, it is logical to assume that the older the site, the more discussed it is and search engines are more likely to give it preference.
If we are talking about an empty domain with a long registration period, then now such a factor exists, but this is a temporary solution, in my opinion. After all, it cannot be said that websites have become worse. So why shouldn’t they be given equal conditions with the old guys?
Therefore, I will allow myself to conclude: the age of the site currently has an influence on its promotion in search engines, but this is temporary.
Which option is better: with WWW or without WWW?
Yes, they even ask such questions. And here there is only one answer - for search engines it makes no difference. The choice is yours. There are also situations when a domain simply looks more attractive with “www”. So why not use a console.
Capital letters in the domain name in Yandex search results
This is done in Yandex Webmaster, section “Site in search results” / “Site name register”. The main task: to make a more attractive snippet for Yandex search results, to highlight important words in the domain name. This has an exclusively indirect effect on website promotion., associated with higher behavioral factors and clickability of the snippet in the search results.
Main conclusions regarding the influence of a domain on its promotion in search engines.
- Choosing a domain is purely personal
- Register, buy and promote the domain that carries either the brand name or is a meaningful name (word, phrase, etc.)
- If you want to quickly rise to the top, keywords in your domain will help you. So far it's working.
- The main factors influencing a site's ranking in the top search results are contained in the site itself, and not in its domain name.
For this, allow me to take my leave. Your grandfather is an SEO specialist.
Ask questions.
The main search engines on the Russian-language Internet are Yandex and Google. Traffic from other search engines is insignificant, so we will consider site optimization (in this case, choosing a domain), focusing on these two search engines, and primarily on Yandex.
Yandex loves domains in the ".ru" zone.
Sites on domains in this zone, all other things being equal, are usually indexed faster than sites in other domain zones (.com .net .info and so on...), since the ".ru" domain by default means that it belongs specifically to the Russian language the Internet sector (as well as Russia as a region), and Yandex is primarily a Russian search engine.
Preferences Google in this regard, they are less pronounced, but it is still advisable to choose the domain “.ru” or “.com”.
The choice of a regional domain has a positive effect on the site’s position in search results in the target region. For example, a site on the ".ru" domain will have better search results positions in Russia than in Ukraine for the same query. A website on the ".ua" domain is the opposite.
Both Yandex and Google now recognize transliteration in the domain name and URL address of pages.
Query “gold” in the Google search engine:
Query “gold” in the Yandex search engine:
Previously, Yandex recognized keywords only if they were separated by a hyphen, or if there was only one keyword. Now the Yandex algorithm has become the same as Google’s in this regard.
The Google search engine is good at identifying the English translation of a keyword. The same search for “gold” on Google:
Yandex translation works poorly. For the query “gold”, for example, the translation is not highlighted:
However, Yandex still highlights the translation of some words. Most likely, this rule applies to the translation of Russian words that originate from English (for example, the query “paintball”):
The keyword in the domain of the site located in the second position is not highlighted, since this screenshot was taken quite a long time ago. At that time, Yandex did not yet recognize keywords in URLs unless they were separated by a hyphen.
Yandex takes into account the direct match of the keyword in the request and in the domain name (see the second position in the illustration).
Google also takes into account the direct match of the key in the query and in the domain name:
An excellent key in a domain name can be a word that is spelled the same both in English and transliterated from Russian. An example of one such word: marketing.
An interesting point: Yandex takes into account the Russian pronunciation of an English word in the domain name. As an example, consider a request with the word “table”, which does not exist in Russian:
It is not clear why Yandex takes such matches into account. Google hasn't noticed anything like this.
Search engines have a positive attitude towards Cyrillic domains (with the presence of keywords in them, of course), however, when using them, quite a lot of technical difficulties arise. In the future, the use of Cyrillic domains seems promising, but for now it is better not to use them.
There is a lot of debate about the degree of influence of the presence of a keyword in the domain name on the search engine optimization of a website. Many professionals believe that this influence is not great, but no one has accurate information. It is quite difficult to evaluate empirically the degree of influence of a domain name on search results. Judging by the search results for some queries, this influence is still significant.
In any case, the presence of a keyword in the domain name increases the relevance of all pages of your site relative to all queries containing this word. This factor must be used, if possible.
It is advisable to keep the domain name as short as possible. The same goes for page URLs in general. Links with short URLs are clicked on approximately twice as often as links with long URLs (Google research results).
Click-through rate is important in itself, since clicks are traffic, but there is also one more nuance regarding promotion. Yandex counts the number of clicks on links in search results. If your site ends up in the top ten, but the number of clicks to it is significantly less than to other sites in the TOP 10, then most likely it will very quickly fly off the first page for this reason alone.
Yandex will consider such a site to be included in the TOP as an error (due to the use of homonym words or something else - this is no longer so important). Therefore, all factors that influence the click-through rate on a link in search results also affect website promotion. Along with the length of the domain name, in this regard, the presence of a favicon and the text content of the title tag are also important (since it coincides with the name of the link in the search results).
If the number of characters in the domain name is about twenty or more, then the keywords in such a domain may be perceived as spam. The same applies to the frequent use of a hyphen separating keywords in a domain name.
Search engines take into account the domain level. Second-level domains (for example, “site.ru”) are much preferable to lower-level domains, since search engines believe that low-level domains usually contain secondary information. Trusted directories are also reluctant to accept links to subdomains.
Another very important SEO characteristic of a domain is its age. Search engines can apply “Sandbox” type filters to sites hosted on young domains (up to 1 year). Links from trusted sites can serve as a good protection for a young site from such filters.
Articles on the topic.
The list of all the factors, large and small, on which the result of search engine promotion depends, probably numbers more than one hundred. Providing some requires effort over many months, while others are done once in five minutes. Today we are talking about just this: how much the choice of domain influences the search engine promotion of a website.
Yes, this may not be the main factor in search engine promotion, but it also matters. It also includes a number of other points that determine ranking.
Factors that determine the level of domain influence on promotion
Keyword in domain name
A good way if you want to quickly get to the top of the search results, especially if the domain key you choose is not the most common. In general, this is one of the few ways to get to the top; for large sites, we would rather not recommend it, especially if the domain turns out to be long and not very attractive. It’s better to use other promotion tools: the domain is for life, but the effect will be relatively small. If you decide that you still need a domain key, don’t forget to place it on different pages of the site to increase relevance. The method works for both Yandex and Google.
Brand in domain
If they are searching for you by brand name, this method will work in much the same way as the previous one. Thanks to a domain with a brand name, you will receive more trust, recognition, and therefore more traffic to the site, which will have a positive impact on. Keep in mind, however, that many competing sites may have similar domain names, so think twice before purchasing a domain.
Domain level
In search engines, the domain level and subdomains are of great importance. The domain can be divided into 3 levels. The third level will be a subdomain. Subdomains are indexed worse than the main domains and it is more difficult for a subdomain to get to the top.
The second level of a domain is generally considered the root domain. In other words, it is basic. 1st level – ru, 2nd level – site.ru, 3rd level page.site.ru.
Domain age
The age of a domain name for search engines is an indicator of reliability, evidence of the seriousness of the website owner’s intentions. After all, renewing a domain from year to year requires investing certain funds. But if you are asked which domain is best for promotion, do not rush to answer unequivocally. It all depends on the situation.
Of course, it is useful to have an “old” domain for SEO promotion. Its age is one of the main factors that have a significant impact on a site's participation in search rankings. But when it comes to buying a domain name that has been used, you should be very careful. After all, it is very unlikely that the previous owner refused to renew the domain lease without reason. One of the reasons may be that it fell under search engine filters, from which it turned out to be an impossible task to remove it. This can be a very unpleasant bonus for the new owner. Therefore, if you are planning to buy an old domain name to promote a new website, you should carefully analyze it for such problems.
Domain zone
Purchasing a domain in a zone that corresponds in theme and geo-affiliation to a web resource is a clear example of how a domain name affects website promotion. In this case, you will also receive benefits from search engines in the form of additional ranking points (subject to the proper level of quality of the website content).
With or without WWW
For search engines there is no difference. The choice is yours. There are also situations when a domain simply looks more attractive with “www”. So why not use a console.
Capital letters in the domain name
This is done in Yandex Webmaster, section “Site in search results” / “Site name register”. The main task: to make a more attractive snippet for Yandex search results, to highlight important words in the domain name. This has an exclusively indirect effect on website promotion, associated with higher behavioral factors and the clickability of the snippet in the search results.
Domain name length
The impact of a domain on promotion can be completely negative if it is too long. In this case:
- none of the Internet users will be able to remember it, which will negatively affect behavioral factors;
- search engines may consider it spam if they detect the use of a low-frequency keyword query of 3 or more words in the domain.
Domain IP address
As a rule, if you have a website on some kind of hosting, then there may be a large number of domains on one IP address, which is essentially a neutral sign, but if among other domains there are sites with a bad reputation, then this will be a signal for that your domain is involved in these GS.
The availability of the IP address also affects. If hosting remains down for several days or during an up-date, this will be a negative signal and a decrease in rankings during the next Yandex update.
Main conclusions regarding the influence of a domain on its promotion in search engines.
Choosing a domain is purely personal
Register, buy and promote the domain that carries either the brand name or is a meaningful name (word, phrase, etc.)
If you want to quickly rise to the top, keywords in your domain will help you. So far it's working.
The main factors influencing a site's ranking in the top search results are contained in the site itself, and not in its domain name.