How Did a Domain With 9 Hyphens Make It To The Top Of Google?
Admittedly I know very little about who to get a site to rank high through SEO, but I found it strange that a search on Google returned as its top result a domain name with 9 Hyphens in it, well ahead of the word with no Hyphens.
The word is “definitely”.
The top ranked result for the search term is d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com
The site itself has little in the way of content and simply says:
“”
The correct spelling is definitely.
Not definately.
Not definatly.
Not definantly.
Not definetly.
Not definently.
And certainly not defiantly.
The correct spelling is definitely.”
The at the bottom there are Google AdSense ads.
So basically a parked page.
The domain with the word spelled correctly without the hyphens, definitely.com barely makes into on to the first page of Google as the last entry.
That domain goes to a Word Press created site, which hasn’t been updated in over a year.
As far as creation date goes the domain d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com was just created in 2007, while definitely.com has a creation date of 1998.
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maybe, because it’s ( d – e – f – i – n – i – t – e – l -y ) a gooddomain
In the results, that domain doesn´t even look too bad.
Well, it is not SEO trick.
It is fun.
Anytime somebody spells definitely wrong or asks how to spell it people will post this link on forums, websites, blogs, twitter, FB… as the answer or as their reaction. So Google is ranking it as nr. 1
However it isn’t so easy to force the url to people. It wants kind of “random factor.” Lot of owners of similar sites are waiting for their moment when somebody will post their url on some forum in the right time before the right audience to get traffic.
Its kind of meme.
The word is always misspelled by people in comments and grammar Nazis insist on linking to this site to correct them.
The site ranks well because it has over 5000 inlinks from many different domains:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com%2F&bwm=i&bwmo=&bwmf=s
LOL.
Behold the power of viral link juice.
The reason that site ranks so high is because every time someone spells “definitely” wrong, a smart ass comes along and links to that site… The contextual relationship between the on-page text from the links and the search term plus social chatter out the wazoo = ranking big.
While none of us know for sure if there isn’t some esoteric tweak in the algo that might account for this, per standard SE wisdom, it doesn’t even read that domain as one word “definitely”. Given the hyphens, it reads it as a series of independent and unrelated letters.
The domain is absolutely irrelevant here. If all on/off page metrics were equal but they used adsfwhort.cx as the domain, they would’ve ranked #1 for “definitely” no different.
meh, mnp beat me to it
The single page site has over 5000 backlinks, likely using a bot to post anchor specific link comments in blogs or forums and has some on page seo (h1, title, etc) these 2 factors are driving it to #1, but this is a very low search term with no real competition and is a prime candidate to get penalized for black hat seo techniques.
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7zezSZtNjoYBp63al8kF?p=www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com%2F&fr=sfp&bwm=i
d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y
d-e-f-i_n-i-t-e_l-y
://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/dnsop/current/msg09022.html
d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com = 5000+ Inlinks
Plus another Inlink from you!
The-Domains.[Many TLDs] Available
Just.Saying.SO
I have a similarly snarky site http://yourandyoure.com/
maybe, it’s a good domain
Don’t worry ..this is just one isolate case…
The power of humor to generate incoming links.
Mike you trying to rank for definitely by copying?
165k exact local searches for me
so it’s not:
leftofthedot
rightofthedot
quality
exact match
typins (doubt anyone is typing that domain) check definitely.com visitors
but links
with no competition that is
No competition.
The same could be done with ” it’s ” and ” its “, which seems to be misspelled all the time.
How Did a Domain With 9 Hyphens Make It To The Top Of Google?
://tinyurl.com/3jjjv34
This is definitely a joke!
Michael, i hope you’re not going to create a craze, lol
i know Rick Schwartz owns a few like this
i could have swore blid t-r-a-f-f-i-c.com used to redirect to his targeted traffic page
however whois shows unpaid at moniker accounts past few years and no record of rick
hmm. maybe i’m losing marbles…………….again
Yep, the 5,000+ backlinks is d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y the reason that the domain is ranking highly. Without them it wouldn’t be on the first page.
“How Did a Domain With 9 Hyphens Make It To The Top Of Google?”
Because of articles like this one.
It D-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y sucks to be definitely dot com.
well what this clearly shows that a domain has less value.there is no intrinsic traffic however the google algorithm has many factors and backlinks are one of the biggest…reguardless of the domain…..any domain using a single google criteria could move on to page one.
this is one reason corp america is sitting on the sidelines and not in the domain game.
and why domainers talk shit and here is a real life example that silences all domainer talk.
i learned this recently when i went to construct a website using the direct match keyword with the domain,landing page text,changing content,revelant pharses, i was on page three. many others were in front of my website.using a nonkeyword domain….however when i started adding backlinks everything changed i moved up to page one quickly..this was the key…right here is your real life example why domains are an evolving asset.and why domainers who simply purchase a domain fail to comprehend the market..here it is in real life..while domainers sit and scratch their heads why isn’t their domain being sold for big money?….this should be articulated several different ways on the domains website to educate all domainers. your the man educate the flock…..
the site is missing one of the most common mispellings.
the question i have is whether being #1 for a word like definitely is at all valuable. who is searching that word?
perhaps some adsense users can chime in with the stats.
also, the domain name might not be relevant to the search engine to any substantial degree, as ls morgan suggests, but it could certainly have an effect on which result the user chooses to select.
no search engine algorithm is perfect. consider what the dominant method for ordering results was before google became #1. for those who remember, it was far worse than counting backlinks. and that’s why google is #1 (maybe… we can only guess in hindsight). there’s no doubt they made a real improvement in that area.
it’s pretty sad to see how many people are committed, and how much effort is expended, to game google’s algorithm (the seo scene), and how comparatively few have devoted themselves, and how little effort overall is put forth, toward improving on google’s method, except by google themselves.
you can’t blame google for the system’s inherent imperfections. after all, they have little incentive to improve on a system that has been working quite well for over a decade.
their competitors have purported to offer improvements to the process of search, but they have not found a better way to rank results. and arguably that’s the most important facet of a search engine. one might also argue for things like interface, speed or index size as important. but google does rather well in all those areas. perhaps it’s the _results_ that matter most to users, above and beyond anything else.
i’m ready for a better search engine, but the truth is, there just isn’t one… in terms of what results are returned and how they’re ordered.
s/adsense/adwords/
interesting article at fastcompany dot com about how bing steals google’s top results for “special case” searches.
“if you can’t beat ‘em, copy ‘em.” – unknown
definitely the right answer is: it’s a good domain!
I see more of these dash domains registered April 8th by probbably someone reading this story. Already live:
http://www.A-c-k-n-o-w-l-e-d-g-e-m-e-n-t.com
http://www.P-r-i-v-i-l-e-g-e.com
http://www.H-a-r-a-s-s.com
It appears that hyphenated domains are actually gaining more weight after the panda update, and deservedly so. At least, in the case of “real” words, not single letters. Whatever was the reason, it looks like definitely.com has been updated since.