Is there an optimal domain name length?
The most popular websites have one thing in common; they're short! In analyzing the top sites identified by Alexa, we see that the average domain length is 6 characters.| Rank | Web Site | Length | |
| 1 | yahoo.com | 5 | |
| 2 | google.com | 6 | |
| 3 | youtube.com | 7 | |
| 4 | live.com | 4 | |
| 5 | msn.com | 3 | |
| 6 | myspace.com | 6 | |
| 7 | wikipedia.org | 9 | |
| 8 | facebook.com | 8 | |
| 9 | blogger.com | 7 | |
| 10 | yahoo.co.jp | 5 |
Chart 1.
The surge of 6 characters names isn't coincidental; "Google" alone accounts for 46 of these with country specified sites such as google.fr, google.com.mx and of course google.com. My associate, Mike Rosenthal, is quick to point out that the most important website is in fact a misspelling of Googol. Subtracting the internet giant from this analysis, we still find that 6 is the most common length.
Chart 2.
Here is a breakdown showing the percentage of sites that are less than or equal to the domain length.
Chart 3.
This shows that 90% of the top internet sites are under 10 characters in length. However the majority of domains are at least 11 characters in length according to Dennis Forbes finding.
PageRank Benefits Shorter Domain Names
Some search engine experts have long suspected that search algorithms may bias ranking of websites based upon the domain name length. While this study isn't looking at the full landscape of domain name, we can see the trend among the top 500. So is a small domain name have some algorithmic benefit in Page Rank? Or is magic number? It reasons that the smaller domains are typically older and more well established; factors that would contribute positively towards PageRank.
Chart 4.
According to this chart, the shorter domains tend to have Summary of interesting points about the top 500 websites-
- Average Length: 6
- Average PageRank: PR=6.5
- Count of ".com"'s: 300
- Number of domains that contain a dash: 12 with an average PR=5.6
Maximum domain name length: 63 characters, plus 4 for ".ext" (previous limit
was 26).
Average domain name length of all domains registered: 11
Average PageRank (presumed) of all domains registered: 1
David Rodecker Founder &
CTO, RelevantAds “getting local
business online"
