Originally Posted by chrishirst

Applying common sense to it, if the hostname was that important for results wouldn't you expect that for every single search anyone ever did, a "keyworded" domain name would be at the top though?

If keywords in domain names were the only factor in SE's algorithms (or one of the only), then yes.

But there are obviously many, many factors that SE's use to determine ranking. (Title is probably the most important on-page factor, keywords in urls (or lack thereof), <title>s of sites that link to the page, use of keyword phrases and related words/phrases in content (I'm not talking about ancient overused metrics and buzzwords like "keyword density"--there are probably a lot of different methods and metrics used by SE's, maybe even including the keyword density in some way), etc).

So, in conclusion:
Google probably does put at least a little weight on keywords in urls (especially if it's in the domain name).



Off topic:
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This is similar to the "Pagerank is USELESS!" posts that are shouted at newbies. "Forget about your sites pagerank!". It's true that worrying about your sites pagerank is a waste of your time (unless you're going to monetize it by selling links on tnx, tla, or one of the other text link brokers). But Pagerank is not totally useless. It is a decent (though very rough) metric for determining a page's "link juice". This can serve as a metric for an automated niche competition analyzer. (Note, automated--if you're taking the time to do it yourself and have some experience, you can get a feel for the competition looking through existing sites.) Or you can use pagerank to determine the rough value of a potential inbound link.

Google probably does put at least a little weight on keywords in urls (especially if it's in the domain name)

The operative words being" probably" and "little", and this is the point we try to get over. The "probably" and "little" make it not worth the effort of missing out on a brandable and memorable hostname just to get a "keyword" in the hostname.

I have a test page where a particular word is used for the pagename. And in the whole of the Google index there are only three pages where this word appears. The others are dupes from a forum so are indented.
The page on my site is last from three because on the other pages, the word appears in the body text and on my page it ONLY appears in the URL. I have gone to a lot of scripting to ensure that the word does NOT appear in any anchor text on my automatic breadcrumb navigation so I could isolate the URL from the anchor text effect, which would of course change the whole aspect of the test.
So if a page with a keyword URL for a word that has only ONE competing page can't be first, what chance has a competitive word/phrase got?

MSN does NOT show the page for the word but does have it indexed
Yahoo! only shows the page on my site for this particular word as does Ask.

and if you want to get down to the lower tier of search
Excite is the same as Yahoo! & Ask, and Mirago & Hotbot have no results at all.

I've read somewhere in this forum that one should also focus on the user's site experience and not just SEO for the benefit of the SEs. I think that having sections and subsections and another subsection would mean clicking on a page link and having to wait a few seconds for the page to load. If I were your site's user, I would prefer that I get the info I want with only just a few clicks away from the homepage.

As for longer or shorter URL, well, I really don't know what's best at all. For me as long as all the relevant keywords are there, it's fine.