Ask different SEO professionals about the relevance, importance, and impact that URLs have on natural rankings and you will most definitely get differing answers, opinions, and suggestions. Until the major search engines post their inner-workings online for all SEOers to read, then the question should not be whether having relevant keywords in your domains is actually doing anything, but rather what are the benefits of having relevant keywords in your domains.
One school of thought is that by having relevant keywords in the domain, the search engines will see this as a more relevant and appropriate search result for search queries. As time and algorithms change, so follows this common misconception. It is now much less important for a domain to have relevant keywords in it for search engine rankings. In addition, with the evolution of dynamic websites, implementing highly relevant domains is becoming more and more difficult. However, before you give up on your domain buying efforts and start selling your existing domains with relevant keywords keep in mind that creating URLs with relevant keywords is NOT obsolete or completely unnecessary.
Here are some reasons to feel a little better about the 100 plus keyword stuffed domains you might be sitting on:
1) Having relevant keywords in your domain still has some beneficial effects on natural rankings in and of itself as the search engines have not completely denounced these efforts yet.
2) Consider the ad copy that appears in the SERPs: the domain name occupies just about 20% of the very valuable real estate in each SERP result. No matter how you see it, one cannot deny its function as a call to action and the increase it provides to the searcher’s perceived relevance.
3) The simple fact that keyword based URLs are much easier to remember than long, irrelevant URLs is one reason that you should snatch up any domains that contain your company most relevant keywords.
4) Since search engines give credit to anchor text with keywords in them and anchor text usually cites the domain, having keyword based domains and anchor text with these keyword embedded domains will provide some search engine ranking help.
5) The psychological effects of seeing what you are looking for in a display url in a SERP result in a way acts as a call to action. Think about it, if you are searching for “los angeles real estate” and you get results with these domains:
www.realtypros.com
www.mrla.com
www.losangelesrealestate.com
Which one are you going to click on?
Exactly!