Starting an online operation from scratch - picking the right URL

Most SEOs will agree that if a body is thinking about launching an online sports betting (or any other) operation from scratch, the whole thing should start from the analyzing the niche, estimating search volumes for certain potentially targetable keywords, estimating potential revenues and analyzing the level of competition in the given niche. All that is followed by picking of the URL. This has been a fairly straightforward issue so far: if one was aiming for the keyword “sportsbook” for instance, then sportsbook.com was the ideal and perfect URL. Of course, in none of the competitive niches (like online casinos, online poker, poker rakeback etc.) are these perfect URLs available, so what people do is they find the next best thing. They first explore the .org and .net domain extensions then all the other available ones. Apparently, as far as search engines are concerned, different extensions make little difference. In competitive niches, finding perfect URLs with any kind of extension is quite impossible though. What folks usually find themselves left with is hyphenated URL-variations, which contain their main keyword and something else too. For sportsbook, a good example would be california-sportsbook.com or anything else that reflects location or whatever the creators of the future website deem relevant.

Now then, the boost that perfect URL gives websites in the SERPS is obvious. A site with a perfect URL but a poor backlink profile will likely outrank a site with a less than perfect URL and slightly better link profile. Still, it is possible to beat out perfect URL sites, as long as they do not have a more or less skilled SEO team backing them up. At that point though, overtaking them in the SERPS becomes quite impossible.

Rumors have surfaced a while ago about search engines moving to break this death –grip that perfect URL sites hold on the top of the pops by downgrading the boost they get for their URLs. Various “experts” were quick to jump on the news morsels and began trumpeting that hyphenated URLs and ones containing the words “best” together with the keyword they aim for would be penalized.

Now, let’s get this straight: what sense would it make to penalize such URLs? Surely, there are websites out there which abuse the system in various ways and which do indeed have hyphenated URLs, however, the vast majority of websites out there which use such URLs are perfectly legit operations. While downgrading the URL boost for perfect URLs would make sense indeed, “penalizing” hyphenated URLs wouldn’t make any whatsoever. After all, the aim of a move like this would be to even the playing field and to allow “brand” sites to rise to the top if they so deserve. “Penalizing” a website for its URL in any way would be a huge mistake. Websites should solely be judged based on their contents and not on some collection of characters which represent the operation on the World Wide Web, and which often end up en-masse in the hands of shady speculators. What the future brings though, remains to be seen. Search engines have no allegiance and lately they have been favoring speculators, so everything is in the books at this stage.

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