I had the same suspicious impression of the domain name too --- I wonder what factors cause that, because it's clearly something not everyone has, and probably gained after years of web browsing. I think the two biggest things that stand out are:
- Has "security" in its name
- Has the current year
I can't explain exactly why I think those factors make it suspicious, however.
> I can't explain exactly why I think those factors make it suspicious, however.
I think I have an idea of why, though I haven't been able to articulate it properly yet.
I've been thinking about it a lot recently because I co-work with a bunch of digital marketers, and some of them have affiliate marketing sites with domains that follow the pattern http://yourexactsearchterm.com.
The best I can come up with is the Uncanny Valley of SEO, where it feels like a website was made and over-optimized specifically for people making my exact search query. Maybe this is unfair or confirmation bias, but I feel like those websites are the most likely to be low quality content farms (e.g. paying content writers pennies to regurgitate content they have no experience with and/or don't understand). Either that, or they are outright scams.
Do any digital marketers here have opinions about this?
"Uncanny Valley of SEO" sounds like the best explanation --- and in my experience, sites with names like you describe have also tended to be content farms.
It's not just domain names, but the paths in URLs too --- an entry with your-exact-search-term.html almost subconsciously gets skipped over when scanning search results, unless the search term is extremely specific and somewhat obscure or I'm specifically looking for a file/path (e.g. spc4r37.pdf)
I think it's because it's smells like arbitrary-but-plausible sounding additions to a domain name, picked until they hit one domain that wasn't taken yet.
Even worse would have been if they had used dashes equifax-security-2017.com.
(plausible for those without the experience of "suspicious impression", of course)
