Google punishes overoptimized domain names

The latest update of the Google algorithm penalizes sites whose domain name consists only of keywords.

Google has just posted a minor update to its algorithm: it penalizes sites whose domain name contains too many keywords. Immediately after Matt Cutts' Twitter announcement, MozCast watchers noted that some sites with hyper-optimized domain names with keywords were downgraded.

Although we cannot say with certainty that these sites have dropped in the ranking because of their domain name, we can see that these are indeed URLs with too obvious sets of keywords, or even whole sentences. At the moment, only 0,6% of queries in English are affected, says Matt Cutts. Better to tackle the keywords in the tags and focus on the brand to register over time.