Are exact match domains (EMD) a thing of the past?

Craig Hoggins
October 3, 2012
Search Engine Optimization

How your domain name can affect your website

A Google algorithm update usually rocks the world of marketers and SEO's around the world.
How your domain name can affect your website

On Friday the 28th of October Matt Cutts Engineer and Head of Web Spam at Google tweeted...

Exact Match Domains
EMD


Basically in the past EMD’s had a heavyweight score in Google for rankings. They were much easier to rank for their exact match keyword with very little quality links and content. That is now a thing of the past. Seomoz wrote a piece on it here and how many sites were affected and how they were affected. If your exact match domain name sites were affected and dropped rankings it’s time to follow all the other update suggestions from panda and penguin. You probably had a lot of exact match links pointing to your site and not enough varied and naked links and very little quality content as well.

Solution:

Use http://ahrefs.com/ to discover your links and the %, exact match anchors. If the % is over 50 then, in my opinion, start removing some of them and start getting/building more varied anchors and naked anchors. Over time your rankings should start to climb up again. In short, quality is always key. Write good content that people will want to link back to and Google will reward you. Let us know if you were affected and your thoughts below.

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