On holidays I always like to do a Google search and see who owns the coveted page one. This year I found that exact-match domains had some solid placement on the first page of Google for the term “Saint Patrick’s Day”. Of course there are some major sites that took the above-the-fold spots like Wikipedia and History.com.
Still there are some great exact match domains enjoying a nice boost in traffic, the two exact-match domains are on page one are:
These guys rule the Saint Patrick’s Day space with a very basic site with lots of Adsense. If you look at their compete data, last year they went from having next to no traffic, to over 200,000 visitors around Saint Patrick’s Day, which means they are probably printing money today. While I’ve never been a huge fan of domains with dashes in them, they do rank just as well as if there were no dashes and this is more proof of that!
That’s right, the exact-match domain without dashes actually ranks below the one with dashes. This should come as no surprise though since it’s all about content and backlinks, the dashes do nothing to help or hurt the ranking so they are absolutely equal. It’s amazing what a difference SEO makes, poor little stpatricksday.com only had around 10,000 visitors last year during the same time period according to compete.
One very important thing to note is that what I see on Google page one might be a bit different from what you see. That being said, for trends like this you will see some consistency, still if you see something different, let me know what you see. Either way it is clear that st-patricks-day.com has done a better job with SEO and is reaping the rewards while stpatricksday.com definitely has the better domain, but probably makes about a tenth of what the dashed version does!
Okay, so if you’re reading this you better have a beer in your hand, and let’s hope you’re wearing green. Now stop reading this, drink faster, and ask yourself “why the heck am I reading about Domaining on Saint Patrick’s Day?” Of course you might ask me the same question, but I am drinking a beer while I’m writing this which makes me just slightly less of a geek!
