Ya gotta wonder why I would choose purple banana hats as the keyword phrase for this test I am running. What a silly phrase – who would even search for it or care about it? That is the exact reason I chose this phrase for my test… no one cares about it, no one will fight to rank for it…it’s just a simple little query space on the search engines that no one ever even thought about. That is perfect for this! The less dynamic the results are, the more I can rely on the results of my own testing. The hardest part of testing something online is to try and keep everything else the same. The internet is way too dynamic for that which makes testing a technique very, very difficult.
This test is a small attempt on my part to see if having your keywords in your domain name make that much of a difference in your search engine ranking. Granted, this is a very low-competition (or no competition) query space, but it needs to be in order for me to have any faith in my results. I’m very curious to see what happens with this test.
I am also looking to see if there is any search engine preference for the domain extension when it comes to ranking. Will a .com rank the highest? What about hyphens in the domain name – will they get discounted and rank the worst? I am performing this test on five different sites and taking all my actions at the same time. Everything is as controlled as I can humanly make it. Let’s see how to test for purple banana hats turns out – should be interesting!