Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ceol 5114 days ago
Consider when searching "nissan" in Google, http://www.nissan.com/ is the fourth result despite being essentially a parked page that no one would ever really want when making that search.

I would say TLDs are very influential.

4 comments

No, www.nissan.com is popular because of Page Rank. It really is little (if anything) to do with the domain name.

The Page Rank is high with nissan.com due to its lawsuit with Nissan Motors. They even have a link at the top of their page with information about the lawsuit.

Many tech articles have been written about www.nissan.com. This is more a study about Page Rank, Public Relations and the Streisand Effect than anything.

The page rank is high probably because of the people who link nissan.com without checking
Interesting domain! But can't they be removed from Google for selling backlinks [0]?

Their ad [1] says it explicitly: "webmasters rank better in Google with backlinks on Nissan.com". That seem to be against the webmaster guidelines, no?

0. http://www.nissan.com/backlinks.php 1. http://www.nissan.com/images/Backlink.jpg

Less a parked page than a flaming middle finger at nissan motor corp. No love lost. Read the dude's time line of judgements and court dates. Sort of interesting IMHO
It's easy enough to demonstrate that Google gives significant weight to domain names that match the search query. It's not entirely clear how that might be influenced by the TLD, though, whether they'd explicitly favor nissan.com over nissan.biz for example.