Since I am in the domain name industry I often hear how little domains count in the Google algorithm from Marketers and how important it is from domainers (even though they rarely develop), both sides have their points but I always enjoy seeing proof in action.
A friend and I were just discussing his recent acquisition of Airplanes.net, we were speculating on whether or not he should develop and he was asking me for advice. Naturally we looked at various aspects: Traffic volume, value of the traffic, age of the domain and naturally the competition. While everything seemed to check out I was floored by what I found in the competing websites, the fierce fight going on between competitors was apparent to me as I found Aerotrader.com has a raging 466,000 backlinks and Airliners.net has an astounding 4 million links! Now given these header and description are just touching the keyword it was obvious to me that one would need to be in the airline industry in order to bother with such an uphill battle.
Being realistic I typically look at the sites at the bottom of the front page of the search engines, I like to see what the immediate competition looks like. Upon looking up I found Airplanes.com on top! What was this? The crown and cup had been handed to the exact keyword domain .com, surely they must have done some extensive work on the site and in order to acquire that top spot. Wrong. While initially we may be able to argue that the quality of the links may be from highly relevant and high PR pages I think we can all agree that the four million links built by Airliners.net could easily out trump the back links built by Airplanes.com: 193.
Again, I understand that these two companies do not specifically target “airplanes” but I think we can all agree that with the keyword in their title surely they should out do Airplanes.com. Please let me know what you think!