SISTRIX, which develops methods and tools for analyzing the search visibility of websites, presented the 2023 rating. It included 100 sites that over the past year were able to maximize their visibility in search engines. Wikipedia.org tops the list, followed by Reddit.com and Instagram.com. The list also includes such resources as Linkedin.com (5th place), Tripadvisor.com (9th place), imdb.com (11th place), Apple.com (12th place), Twitter.com (15th place) and many others.
The Domain Gang, reporting this news, draws attention to the fact that in the first hundred leaders, only 19 sites operate on domain names that are commonly used dictionary words. The remaining 81 use domains that contain abbreviations, non-existent words (brand names), combinations of several words, etc. So, while common vocabulary words as domain names are considered the most valuable domain asset, they don't seem to do much to improve search engine visibility.
By the way, the same point of view was recently expressed by Google team specialist John Mueller. He (speaking as a private individual and not as a representative of Google) wrote that in the long term the choice of such a name is unfortunate, since it hinders the prospects for the site's development and does not provide any advantages in terms of in terms of visibility in search engines on one of the Reddit forums during discussion ensued about such domain names. The arguments are quite obvious: on the one hand, the conventional owner of a swimsuit store may consider the acquisition of the swimsuits.com domain a huge success. But if in the future he expands the assortment of his store, then the name of the site will already be perceived as inappropriate, to say the least. On the other hand, such a domain is convenient if the user already knows a specific site and can enter the name directly into the address bar of the browser. But if a user is simply looking for a swimsuit store in a search engine, then the query swimsuits will return a great many sites, and the site swimsuits.com does not have much of a chance of being the first in the search display.
It is curious that this comment by John Mueller, as well as the forum thread itself, were soon deleted from Reddit, although some of the comments remained.
