How Do BlackFriday.com and CyberMonday.com Rank This Year?

Last year, I wrote an article about BlackFriday.com and CyberMonday.com, two exact match shopping domain names that ranked #1 in Google for their respective keywords at the time of the article. With all of the changes that have gone on in search in the last year, I thought it would be interesting to see how these two websites on EMDs are doing a year later.

A Google search for “Black Friday” shows that the Wikipedia page for Black Friday currently ranks #1 for the search term. BlackFriday.com ranks #2 for this search. BlackFriday.com has four sitelinks listed on the results page, which helps to enhance its presence and likely increases its click through rate. BlackFriday.com is owned by Reinvent, the company founded by Kevin Ham.

A Google search for “Cyber Monday” shows that CyberMonday.com still ranks #1 for that search term. Similarly to the BlackFriday.com search result, Google lists four sitelinks within the search result. CyberMonday.com is owned by the National Retail Federation, the organization that coined the “Cyber Monday” term.

Since these search results are ultra competitive, it is possible that the order will change today or over the weekend. I doubt that is going to happen, but it is possible.

Although I am frequently told that exact match domain names have lost importance over the last few years (which may be the case to some degree), we can see that these two exact match .com domain names are still performing well. I always think it’s beneficial to know a few high ranking EMDs for when a potential buyer tries to tell you that keyword .com domain names aren’t as important as they once were.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

12 COMMENTS

  1. I am not surprised that CyberMonday is doing good because of the owner.
    I am surprised that BlackFriday.com does so well. Congratulations because that means a lot of money today.

  2. “I always think it’s beneficial to know a few high ranking EMDs for when a potential buyer tries to tell you that keyword .com domain names aren’t as important as they once were.”

    This is true but of course they would rank number 1 because they are a once a year event so how much competition is there except for that one day and maybe a week leading up to it. Same goes for most once a year events such as SuperBowl , Indy500, US Open, Kentucky Derby etc…..

    • If Google bases its rankings off content and domain then these domains should rank number 1 because they have the exact match domain and their content is 100% either Black Friday or Cyber Monday info. A company like Walmart may be their competition but they don’t have the domain and their info pertaining to these subjects is probably very minimal except for this time of the year so Google is giving these sites priority because they match perfectly what Google wants which is content and domain.
      If Walmart were to focus more attention on this subject throughout the year they would probably rank number 1 even without the domain because Google loves big brands. You can see how little effort the Big Brands put towards this when you look at the rankings on page 1 which include foxnews.com and the twitter handle Black Friday. If these big brands really put in effort these examples would be no where near the first page in an organic search and you definitely wouldn’t see a domain like theblackfriday.com 4th on the list. I have never heard anyone say “the black friday” but its on page 1 because of little competition of a once a year event.

  3. But both are being natural and transparent to Google. Both using analytic’s and more than likely webmaster tools.

    Domain name relevancy is a factor that’s not so heavily used anymore, however, based on its reliance in the past its allowed domains to get weight via age, authority link juice etc etc.

    Also both sites metrics show that the bounce rate is ok (BlackFriday being very Good!) and the avg time on site + avg page views is telling google its relevant to the user and so on.

    We all have keyword relevant domains and a majority of them wont have the required metrics for the later algorithms dependent on the industry, so, its just more work for us (keeps us on our toes)

    Plus it seems that more than half the traffic generated to both sites isnt organic, big indicator that serps wont see them as ‘keyword whores’

    Point is, their both providing a relevant service. Serps want users to find this straight away, these sites match the relevance. Job done

    • Good point, BMOC. Welcome to the future of Google.

      It won’t be long until every spot on the first page is a paid spot if it has any commercial relevancy at all, or they just force everyone that makes money off the first page so they have to pay for advertising just to get some traffic.

      What other adverting source in the world gives away free advertising? None. It’s the future whether we like it or not.

  4. Half surprised Google does not treat this keyword URL like it treats others. If a gas giant (walmart, victorias secret, gap, etc) happens to mention a particular keyword, *BOOM*, they get #1 organic ranking.

    If a site is about a keyword, with articles and text about that keyword, with different varieties of that keyword (long, short, red, thin, big keyword) with other sites writing about that site and its keyword, then it is not Google-releveant. And the keyword search turns up huge corporate advertisers that neither deserve nor need to be found by the keyword.

    By any definition, this is spam, and is in direct violation of google’s own holy ‘user experience’ nonsense that they have been shoving our noses in for years.

    Let’s see Macy’s have a huge marketing push for ‘cyber monday’ and watch what happens.

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