Why in the world would someone pick the phrase purple banana hats as a keyword phrase to testing ranking factors? Have I lost my mind? No, I haven’t. This is a calculated choice on my part. I needed to keep as much of the search engine results as stable as I could in order to test one change in factors. In high-competition query spaces, it is all but impossible to get other things to stop so you can accurately test something. Therefor, I needed to go with a low to no-competition query space that I was familiar with.
The point of this test is to try and attempt to answer the question of whether having your keywords in your domain name really makes that much of a difference. I personally feel that in very low-competition markets, it could make a big difference – and in high-competition spaces, it alone won’t do much, but you still need all the advantage you can get. With all things being equal, I think it matters – or at least gives an edge over the others.
The other thing I want to test and see for myself is regarding the extension of a domain name. If all things are equal, and keywords are in the domain name, will the search engines show favor to a .com or another extension? What about having hyphens (dashes) in your domain name… good or bad? This whole test should prove to be not only fun for me, but enlightening, too. It’s hard to be sure about anything with ranking factors, but this should shed some light on the subject. Stay tuned for the purple banana hats test results. Not sure what will happen, but we’ll see.