Last week I posted the results of my analysis of the domain names for the Technorati Top 100 blogs.  You can see the results here.

This week I conducted a further analysis of the domains to look at some other interesting factors to consider when choosing and managing domain names for your blogs.

People vs Brands

For the purposes of this comparison I counted any domain name that had part or whole of a persons name in it as a “person”, and the rest as brands.  So for example huffingtonpost.com (ranked #1) was counted as a person and cnn.com as a brand.

• Domain Names for People – 13
• Domain Names for Brands – 87

Furthermore, 17 of the domain names were for major media brands such as NY Times (4 blogs), LA Times (3 blogs) or Wired (2 blogs).

“Daily” Domain Names

Of the top 100 blogs only 6 contain the word “daily” in them.

Domain Age

I measured the domain age using public WHOIS data for each of the domains.  I used three different WHOIS resources to verify a few that seemed obviously wrong (eg some sites have CNN’s initial registration date as being in 2009).

• Average Domain Age – 8.45 years
• Average Domain Age of Top 10 – 7.8 years
• Oldest Domain – 19 years for latimes.com
• Youngest Domain – 0.9 years for zerohedge.com

Looking at the overall pattern there is no consistent trend of older domain names ranking better.

Length of Registration

Some of the domain names have been registered for many years into the future while several others will expire within a month.

• Average Years to Expiry – 2.7 years
• Furthest Expiry Date – 9.5 years away
• Closest Expiry Date – 3 weeks away

Conclusions

These figures reveal to us that:

• Domain names for brands make up more of the top 100 blogs than those for people.  Although arguably Huffington Post is a brand and not a person, this only demonstrates to us the potential success of a personal brand in blogging.  So don’t be afraid to use your name or a variation of it for your domain name.
• Domain names as young as 1 or 2 years have ranked in the top 100, but the top 30 blogs have domain names of at least 4 years age.  Choose your domain name carefully but remember that it is more likely to be a long term consistent blogging effort that propels you into the ranks of very successful blogs.
• Although all of these blogs post new content daily (in some cases dozens of new articles every day) only 6 chose to use the word “daily” in their domain name.  Remember that blogging frequency is important but is not required to be every single day.  But if you use the word “daily” in your domain name you set an expectation with readers that you will be delivering new content every single day.
• There is talk in SEO circles that the length of registration for a domain could be considered an indicator of trust by search engines such as Google.  However many of the top 100 blogs only renew their domain name registration for a few years at a time.  Although a shorter registration period won’t penalise your site at all, longer registration may help boost rankings (even just a little).  At the very least it is less admin for you to only have to renew your domain name every 10 years instead of annually.

Photo Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Domain Names, SEO