During an AskGooglebot session, one SEO professional asked John Mueller whether or not a .jobs domain would help you rank for jobs.
He answered that no, you don’t get a bonus for ranking a .jobs domain.
He also explains that just because there’s a keyword in a domain name, it doesn’t signify that that domain is more relevant than others that might come up in search.
It’s also worth noting that businesses evolve over time, and that moving domains is difficult. He believes it’s better to choose a domain that will help you over the long haul, rather than selectan exact-match domain that will only help you short-term.
One example he posited was a domain name containing the keywords ‘blue widgets.’. If you’re initially offering blue widgets, then begin selling red widgets, how will you offer those widgets on a ‘blue widget’ website?
Don’t focus on exact-match keywords on the domain. Instead, work on building up a high-quality website that you can use in the long term for all of your offerings.
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
John 0:03
Today’s question is from Yvonne Hydra. Yvonne is asking: “Does a .jobs domain improve the ranking in Google specifically for jobs websites?” This is a really common question that comes up for the new top level domains.
In short, no, you don’t get a special bonus from having a keyword like that in your top level domain. Anecdotally, you can see that by searching naturally for anything that interests you, I’d venture a guess that the top results don’t have those keywords as a domain ending.
Often it’s not even in the URL at all. That’s by design. Just because a website has a keyword in its domain name doesn’t mean that it’s more relevant than others for that keyword.
In short, you don’t need to put keywords in the domain name. From a practical point of view, it’s worth also keeping in mind that businesses evolve over time, and moving domains is hard. So it often makes sense to pick a domain name that you can use for the long run, and not necessarily one that just matches what you’re offering today.
For example, if you focus on making awesome blue widgets, and build your website on bestbluewidgets.com, what do you do when you start offering red widgets?
So instead of spending too much time on the domain name or top level domain, focus instead on building up a site that you can continue to use for the long run.
I hope you found this video useful and insightful and I’ll see you next time.
