Domain names that contain the word THE

We have been working on manipulating the SERP’s for over 2 years now, and we’ve tried and tested lots of different methods that all seem to work in their own way. Since Adam has been on-board he has shown us how well a properly optimised site can do – all by itself – in the search results, and we have practised a lot of the off-site search engine manipulation techniques, so now we bring them all together and can really offer a great service that really gets brilliant results.

However, despite having tried everything, learnt from our mistakes and read every article known to man regarding SEO – there are still some things that baffle us!

We have been working on the X Cam Project for nearly 5 months, and although the website is ace, the content is all unique and we did some very careful link building – we COULD NOT get it to rank for the terms “the x cam” or “xcam mini” or things like “xcam pro”. Normally, clients want us to get them high in google for generic industry specific search terms, and the site usually ranks well straight away for the  brand specific terms – however in this case it seemed to be the other way round. We were starting to rank for the terms like “Helmet camera” and “Motorcycle camera” and were still no where to be found for the very specific brand-related stuff.

So lets analyse what is going off here?

We stopped doing ANY work on the industry specific terms, and put all our eggs into one basket so we could capture the customers who had heard of the new brand, and were looking directly for it.

We were linking the words “the x cam” to the homepage, and of course the front page of the site was geared up for that term – yet still, nowhere to be found.

Then I noticed something that made me think a little. I searched for the x cam in Google, and looked at the top right hand part of the screen near the amount of search results;

Results 1 – 10 of about 24,100,000 for the x cam. (0.36 seconds)

It seems that the word “the” was being totally disregarded by Google, was it this that was causing the issues? We couldn’t be sure that it was because of this that the X cam site was doing so poorly – it could have been because the term “X Cam” also applies to porn sites and “Cam sites” – but then if it was blacklisted by google then surely NO pages would be in the SERP’s?

The only way we’d know for sure if this was in fact the root of the problem was to try swapping the domain names. We picked “XCamera.co.uk” as it was still relevant, and it was a UK domain name that had never been used before and the word Camera is less porn-like than Cam.

Plenty of 301 redirects and edited config files later, and we’d ported the site over to XCamera.co.uk. All we had to do then was wait for google to update and see where we’d landed.

First impressions were not brilliant, it seemed to take ages to swap over – but once it did the results were fantastic. Its now page 1 in google for “Xcam Mini”  “Xcam Pro” “Xcam Wireless” and many other XCam related terms.

So it goes to show, simply by choosing the wrong domain name can cause weird problems on google, that im sure not even google themselves truly understand.