How important is domain name in SEO now

[diggdirectory]

domain name was very important earlier but now after Google algorithm updates domain name has less important now

[universal4]

There is still some value in a domain name, but a portion of the value comes from branding and how well the name fits with the branding.

As an example, let's say you sell blue widgets, you could brand bluewidgets.com or bestbluewidgets.com but if they are not available, you could probably brand:
best-blue-widgets.com or bestbluewidgets.net or bestbluewidgetsonline.com and still be able to target "blue widgets" as your main key words.

Most of this is just common sense and your choice of the domain name itself will have more to do with how well you can get people to remember the brand, as well as how you intend to market it.

Rick
Universal4

[justbookies]

There has been a lot of talk of exact match domain names getting punished, but that only happens when they have been caught committing some form of spam (often backlink anchor text spam) anyway. If you look at the google.co.uk seach for "free bets", six of the 10 links on the first page still contain "freebets" in the domain (I include the dyslexic one with 'betsfree'). While other factors are at play, like these guys are targeting this keyword more than other people are, that still suggests there can still be some significant value to an exact match domain name, though it is not as important as once was and is arguably more open to getting penalised if not handled correctly.

[JackTenSuited]

I think it's very important on bingo/Yahoo I've had some EMDs rank very well with little effort, shame the traffic is minimal

[wettFORM.AT]

I was also not sure if I should use a keyword domain name or not. Now I am glad that I don't because google preferes brand names so I would again start with a brand name. There are so much ranking factors right now so that the domain name is only one part of it.