The other day we reported how Gary Illyes said keywords in TLDs, like those new keyword based TLDs, do not improve your rankings.

So I wanted to get more clarification. Was it that keywords in general in the URL are such a light weight signal that Google wouldn’t say they make a difference in rankings or was it that Google specifically ignored the words in the TLD.

I asked John this at the 12:45 minute mark in the Google Hangout on Google+ yesterday and he said, Google ignores the words in the TLD completely.

Again, the TLD of the URL is the domain.tld. So on this site, the TLD is .com. But people sell TLDs like .attorney, .events, .seo, etc. Google’s John Mueller said they completely ignore the words in the TLD portion.

Here is the transcript:

Barry: So, I know we shouldn’t care about keywords in the URLs and so forth, but Google has said over time that keywords in the URL do get looked at by the algorithms, they might have a tiny little, tiny little, itty-bitty factor in terms of rankings. But you specifically called out saying that keyword rich TLDs, like .attorney for example… Are they not looked at all? Do you say anything in the TLD is not, the keywords in the TLDs are not looked at all? Are they excluded? Or are they the same as keywords in the URL?

John Mueller: As far as I understand, it’s pretty much completely. So the TLD is not something we take into account there.

Barry: At all?

John Mueller: Yea.

Here is the video embed:

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