Search Terms in URLs

I have just started reading Click by Bill Tancer of Hitwise fame. I am really enjoying the book so far particularly when Bill describes trends via search data analysis. The first chapter of Click is titled ‘PPC – Porn, Pills and Casinos’ which (no surprise here) shows various interesting data trends involving Search Engine search terms for Viagra, sex, gambling and other related terms.

SEO and Keywords in URLs

Enterprising individuals and organizations used to (and still do to some degree) buy URLs / Domain Names with common search words in the name e.g. poker-gambling-casino.com includes often searched for words in the URL itself (poker-gambling-casino.com is due to be available today for anyone wanting to buy this domain name). This was part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and was effective at first as the URL describes what the Website is supposedly about. It was also thought that Google, Yahoo and other Search Engines would rank sites with keywords in the URL more highly.

From SEO to Porn

Anyway, I decided today to spend a short time analysing .com domain names expiring yesterday (10 September 2009) to determine how many of the expiring names include keywords related to ‘Porn, Pills and Casinos’. In Click it is noted that sex related searches are significantly the most common search category on the Internet. Of the 52,426 .com domain names expiring yesterday here are the number of domain names containing each of the following common search words (related to ‘Porn, Pills and Casinos’):

So, from the analysis of expiring domain names it is evident that Porn related keywords exist in more expiring domain names than any other category of keyword. Interesting, but it doesn’t really tell us anything purposeful!