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This can of worms was just recently opened on me, and since my blog is an outlet for not only knowledge but also frustration, I figured this would be a great place to throw down on this can of worms.
There has been quite the argument as of late within the online search marketing community discussing all the negatives and oh so many changes that their sites have gone through the past 8-12 months. Now if you are a tried and true online marketer, then you will understand that this is an evolving landscape. What worked years ago in online search marketing, may not work anymore (or just of course does not work at all and is a gross waste of time).
With that being said, I don’t understand when one tidbit of information that comes out of the “Big G”, then everyone flocks in the other direction. When one goes on heresy as opposed to due diligence is when my job becomes that much harder (or easier, since I know what really works.)
As of late, there still has been many questions about what domains work in search, and what doesn’t. One in particular is whether or not exact match domain names are dead.
Some people have totally taken this out of context. As exact match domains are very much not dead. And I’ll showcase why.
They certainly aren’t dead, but they are a little buried. And really, it’s a bit of a good thing on both sides. Since “Exact Match Domains” (also known as EMD’s) have been of the utmost value for such a long time, they no longer have the same weight they once did. And really why should they?
It was very common practice just a few years ago, for major domain brokers/squatters to buy up heavy highly searched domain names to just wait for someone to come along and pull the “used car salesman” attitude towards purchasing it, or otherwise use it to erect auto generated affiliate product sites to major retailers or service providers for just taking an existing product feed from a potential network and literally popping up sites overnight with no real work, value or sweat equity. Being a hard working online developer such as myself creating engaging content everyday made me feel very frustrated to say the least.
But does that really mean that EMD (Exact Match Domains) truly dead?
Absolutely not. And if you think clearly about it, it’s simple really.
1: Exact Match Domain site content usually is 90% relative to the name itself. People looking to sell kitchen sinks, would not put their kitchen sink information on a site about sinus medication. They just wouldn’t.
2: Because of the above, usually the internet browser will see the exact relative term in above the fold page 1 results, and actually have a higher click through rate. Therefore “big G” sees these trends, and credits it accordingly.
3: Not showing any keyword based sites whether it be partial or full, would just be bad form for any search engine given the infrastructure of the web, and how search engines even came to be. Which in essence basically indexed and crawled “relative content” to show what their perception of what would be “good results”.
So there you have it. 3 MAJOR REASONS, on why exact match keyword domain names still hold some value.
Google may have definitely heavily devalued the EMD, but totally eradicating it, they did not. They just leveled the playing field to make it more fair, and give earnest content developers a fair shake.
So, what are you waiting for? Go get a decent domain, and build informative content on it so that you can spur life back into that EMD.
