ICANN recently expanded the maximum length for domain names from 23 letters to 63 letters because of the reported shortage of domain names available. This opens up a huge market and makes it much easier for new businesses to join the Internet and have their own domain that identifies what they do.

        As far as I can see, there is only one purpose to having a long domain name, to increase your ranking in the search engines.  An example of a long domain might be:

www.loans-car-auto-home-business-equity-refinance-sba.com

        This domain would provide keywords to a search engine and would help to increase the search rankings for those keywords.  It would not guarantee rankings, it would only help. A site with the domain AutoLoans or Auto-Loans would likely rank higher for the search for auto loans because of the limited length in domain and higher relevance to a search engine.

        Today, some of the search engines look at a domain name when they give rankings. But as I have said before, there are going to be so many websites on the Internet in the near future that no search engine will be able to take into account all of the keywords that are listed in the metatags.

        Some engines have already reduced the number of metatag words they read to just the first ten words. As many businesses buy up and use keyword domains, the search engines will recognize that they have paid good money for their domains and will give considerable credence to them.

        I would expect that a search engine that relied entirely on domain names would list them not according to how many times they found the same keyword in the name, but rather how close to the beginning of the name the keyword is.   Understand that it is likely that no search engine will work exactly like that. This is just an example of how it might turn out if all it did was sort by domain name. Search engines are much more complex than that. 

        Some search engines auction off the top spots for certain keywords. Others rank based on how many hits a site receives from their engine, so that if people go to your site from their search you get moved up in the rankings. This is one of the reasons that people are getting paid to surf, assuming you’ve heard of that before.

        Another reason to have a long domain would be for questions, such as:

How-To-Register-With-Search-Engines.com

HowToRegisterWithSearchEngines.com

But these will have limited uses unless a company markets a large number of question domains well and has good websites to go with them. 

        For the speculator, I recommend you stay away from these.  There are just too many ways possible versions of a long domain name and no way of knowing what type will rank better with the search engines.