Every year I’m interested to see which domain names make it above-the-fold for competitive terms like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas. Now with a day to go before Christmas I found the following three sites in my top three on Google when searching for the word christmas:
- Wikipedia
- History.com
- Merry-Christmas.com
Yes, Christmas.com wasn’t anywhere to be found on the first page, neither was MerryChristmas.com, instead in the #3 spot is Merry-Christmas.com. It has been known for a long time but this is another great example of how a dash doesn’t hurt you at all and at the end of the day good SEO can beat an exact-match name any day.
![merry-christmas-com](/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/merry-christmas-com.png)
According to SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer the site has roughly 1,500 backlinks coming from 393 different root domains.
![merry-christmas-seo](/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/merry-christmas-seo.png)
Compare this to Christmas.com which has 4,372 links but only 546 backlinks which means a few sites are sending a massive amount of links…which Google isn’t crazy about. So even with more backlinks it doesn’t beat out Merry-Christmas.com which has higher quality backlinks, not by a lot, but by enough to make the difference.
![christmas-com-seo](/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/christmas-com-seo.png)
As you can see, in the end Merry-Christmas.com ends-up with a page authority only two higher than Christmas.com but their SEO around the word Christmas coupled with higher quality backlinks seems to have made the difference.
I finally found Christmas.com on page 5 of Google below santa.net. So if you thought buying an exact-match domain meant nice juicy ranking advantages, think again. Take Christmas.com a six maybe seven-figure domain and compare it to Merry-Christmas.com which was most-likely hand-registered. Yet Merry-Christmas.com is #3 in Google and Christmas.com is buried on page 5.
Of course I still love exact-match domains but it’s always important to remember that it’s what you do with the domain that really matters.
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