Is it a bad idea to have a catchy brand name url redirect to an exact match domain

[skincareseo]

A friend wanted to setup a website where people would share and vote on "widget" ideas where the winning idea got build for free. They bought cute the domain name widg.et and branded their site as widg.et. However, for SEO, they are having widg.et forward to www.sharewidgets.com. Then, to complicate things further, they changed their business model to remove the voting feature and now the site is just set to show off the widgets they've made and let people order new custom widgets. They might add the voting feature back later. "Widget" and "widgets" in this case has an SEOmoz difficulty of 72% and 71%, so quite high and none of the two word or long tail phrases have much traffic.

What do you think they should do:

1. Remove all domain forwarding and use widg.et as their only domain as it's less confusing and better for branding

2. Get another domain that includes their keyword widget for the SEO exact match benefit

3. Keep it as is, even though "sharewidgets" is no longer quite as applicable

Many Thanks!

[SimonCullum]

Hi Daniel

An interesting question.

1. widg.et ~ I can see why this was chosen, spells 'widget' stating the obvious. However in terms of search, it doesn't work like that, the keyword in the domain is 'widg' the top-level-domain isn't included. 'widg' isn't a word as far as I know, so not particularly helpful for Search or Usability as it does take a second look to figure out what it's supposed to say.

2. Exact Match domain names don't carry as much SEO weight as they used to, especially with regards to Google. Better off concentrating on getting the URL naming structure right, plus the Titles, Descriptions, H1 tags and the anchor text in some great inbound links.

3. If the website has become known as 'Share Widgets' (as in www.sharewidgets.com) then may as well stick with this rather than confusing existing followers & visitors with another change.

So out of all the options you're considering, I'd recommend going for No. 3, keep the current domain name and focus on optimizing that both on-page and off-page.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon