Evidence
This page contains anecdotal evidence to support the claim that the words in a web site address can significantly affect the ranking in search engines.
MSN UK is one of the smaller, but yet still important, search engines. It appears that this search engine is particularly influenced by the domain name, as this web page shows.
Comparing a large web site with a small web site
TechScribe brands itself as a software documentation consultancy. We use the key phrase 'software documentation' throughout the web site. Compare the results in the table for the search term 'software documentation' in the MSN search engine. As of 10 August 2006, the tiny web site www.software-documentation.co.uk took second place, and had only been available since July 2006.
| Web site address | Available | Number of pages | Rank in MSN |
|---|---|---|---|
| www.techscribe.co.uk | April 1999 | more than 150 | 1 |
| www.software-documentation.co.uk | July 2006 | 7 | 2 |
View a screen shot of the search results.
Detailed results for various web site addresses
This section will be continually updated as we obtain more evidence about keywords and web site addresses.
In all cases, the search term matched the URL. For example, for www.web-site-address.co.uk, the search term was: web site address
Click a URL (domain name) to see a screen shot of the MSN search result.
| Web site address | Available | Number of pages | Rank in MSN | Total results (millions) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| software-documentation.co.uk | July 2006 | 7 | 1 | 9.55 |
| technical-writing.co.uk | 4 August 2006 | 2 (under development) | 1 | 12.01 |
| user-guide.co.uk (no screen shot) | 11 July 2006 | 8 | 7 | 57.06 |
| web-site-address (this site) | 21 July 2006 | 7 | 1 | 19.67 |
Discussion
The URL www.user-guide.co.uk does not give as good a result as the other web addresses. Why is this? My initial thought was that it was because the web site had too few pages (at the time, only 3 pages). However, I now believe that it's because of the relatively high level of competition from other web sites.
These results are from one search engine. It's not proof that words in the URL lead to good search engine results in all search engines (other search engines don't give results as good as this), but it certainly works in at least one search engine.