Jeffrey Braverman of NutsOnline.com paid a few hundred thousand bucks for a Clean Domain Name? Then saw his company’s web traffic decline after moving to a four-letter domain: Nuts.com — what went wrong? Jay Bean, co-founder of OrangeSoda, points out »
If you want an easy-to-remember URL, then you probably don’t actually need to move your site. You could buy Nuts.com and redirect it to NutsOnline.com. No move is required, so you don’t lose all the credibility and traffic you’ve built up. […] The tragic thing is that in the eyes of search engines, the value of having Nuts.com versus NutsOnline.com is probably negligible.
BTW, the entire case of Jeffrey Braverman’s effort to optimize his family’s nut selling operation online, in Dave Pell’s words, ”is evidence of Google’s incredible power in the marketplace and a reminder that, these days, to be an expert on almost any business requires being an expert on search engine optimization.”