SEO and Cookies

This week our support team fielded a request from one of our customers concerning the purchase of an additional domain name. Our customer had been approached by an opportunistic domain name broker / reseller offering to sell the domain name SomethingSimilarToTheirs.com. (Well, not that domain name, but you know what we mean! If our customer’s domain name was AcmePrintingUSA.com, the broker was offering a variation like Acme-Printing-USA.com.) Aaron (on our support team) provided an answer that’s accurate and entertaining. Here it is: Hi Joe, My recommendation would be to save your money and stick with the domain name you have. Instead, focus on politely asking your vendors, customers, chamber of commerce and local business blogs to link to your site. And here’s the long explanation why: Domain names have an increasingly small (if no) effect on rankings, in part because it is so easy to attempt to manipulate search engine rankings with them. For instance, if you want the world to know that you have the world’s best cookie recipe, you could just register worldsbestcookierecipe.com and expect the search-engine traffic to come rolling in. But what if you don’t actually have the world’s best cookie recipe? Google’s view is that