Overture Score - What's the point?

**dewpoint** · 08-08-2005, 11:38 AM

Over the past few months, I have noticed more and more domains being sold on the basis of their "Overture Score". Am I missing something, or am I right that the overture score is simply a new sales tool to make a domain look better, but doesn't have any measurable effect whatsoever on Search Engine Optimization.

Curious....

**MediaHound** · 08-08-2005, 11:45 AM

The Overture score is generated from the Yahoo network of websites.
It helps determine how often people are typing in the term / domain.

It's not some new sales tool to make a domain look better. It's the puddin where the proof lies.

The higher the term, generally speaking, the greater the chances of competition as far as SEO goes. Otherwise, there's really no coorelation as to ovt score and SEO.

**scorpio** · 08-08-2005, 11:48 AM

http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...rm=&lang=en_US

Type yahoo.com and yahoo , It will show u searches done in May 2005 on overture network . So with ext it means the domain was searched and without ext it means term was searched.

11589698 yahoo.com with ext

16497407 yahoo without ext only term

**namestrands** · 08-08-2005, 12:55 PM

ironic really as overture was designed as a tool for advertisers to see how many people searched for a specific term, so as to better understand there competitors.. it was never meant for the purpose of verifying domain traffic.. now you see just dropped domain with an overture score of 20-40 and these domains sell for a few hundred dollars at time.. however as most drop scripts do prior searches in search engines to see if a domain is listed or not, it creates a false sense of worth.. the more people who look up the domain the higher the score..

whats more it is now so easy to manipulate even overture score.. recently done an experiment that allowed us to create an overture score of 15,000 for a site that did not even exist.. all it took was one line of code..

my advice... unless you can see the traffic.. dont trust what people say it is..

**Blarian** · 08-08-2005, 03:41 PM

Originally Posted by dewpoint

Over the past few months, I have noticed more and more domains being sold on the basis of their "Overture Score". Am I missing something, or am I right that the overture score is simply a new sales tool to make a domain look better, but doesn't have any measurable effect whatsoever on Search Engine Optimization.

Curious....

It doesn't necessarily mean anything as far as SEO goes. All it means is that Overtures has an opinion or data estimate relating to the quantity of searches for that term. It doesn't mean that if you buy a domain that has a high overture keyword in it your going to rank well on search engines or have any type of advantage. It's just an end result tool, like the PageRank toolbar is; The important thing is determing what (if any) value those results mean. I wouldn't invest any money solely based on the factor of high overture, other factors have to be taken into account, IMO.

**dewpoint** · 08-11-2005, 07:37 AM

Interesting. Yep, the Overture score does seem to be simply a marketing tool, with little or no actual worth. I just have to look at any of my own domains which are strong performers in the search engines. None of them have any of the optimized keywords in the domain name.

I'm just surprised that a board like this, frequented by domain professionals uses this apparently useless feature as a selling tool.

Page rank..that's something completely different. If you know how to capitalize on a site with existing pagerank that is still being cached frequently by the search engines, then this is a very valuable feature indeed.

**StockDoctor** · 08-11-2005, 08:07 AM

Originally Posted by dewpoint

Interesting. Yep, the Overture score does seem to be simply a marketing tool, with little or no actual worth. I just have to look at any of my own domains which are strong performers in the search engines. None of them have any of the optimized keywords in the domain name.

I'm just surprised that a board like this, frequented by domain professionals uses this apparently useless feature as a selling tool.

Page rank..that's something completely different. If you know how to capitalize on a site with existing pagerank that is still being cached frequently by the search engines, then this is a very valuable feature indeed.

OK, you stick with the OV #s are meaningless theory, and I'll take the high OV # names. Now page rank has been stated to be meaningless by the SEO pros recently, so we're in total disagreement it would appear.

Different strokes for different folks. A market it does make.