SEO Dynamics | Exact Match Domain Name Penalty
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
If know anything about SEO, you probably know that exact match domain (EMD) was an excellent strategy to make pages to rank well on Google.
But here is what just happened! In September of 2012 Google started filtering poor quality domains and getting rid of the low quality websites which the only focus was on getting traffic via a exact match domain name.
As always, there are good and bad news about it. The good news are: there will be some spots available on page one, on the other hand, if you were trying to use exact match domains (EMC) for ranking your pages higher on Google you can be penalized.
Exact Match Domain vs Good Content!
It doesn’t mean that a good and high quality website will also be affected. No!
Google will always reward good content and legit businesses, or at least they will try to do their best to privilege high quality content.
Here I’m adding an answer given by John Mueller which is Webmaster Trends Analyst that works at Google. He is trying to address the preoccupation of a business owner which built his entire business around exact match domain. John is explaining to the website owner what Google can do in order to don’t hurt real and legit businesses.
Here is the fragment of his answer:
Bottom line, a legit business that happens to have an Exact Match Domain is not going to be penalized or loose the value of their domain matching the query….. so back up your claim. Let us examine it. And if you are correct then one of the TCs will escalate the findings for Google to evaluate and potentially modify their algorithm.
Source: Seroundtable.com
This is going to be really challenging for spammers who are trying to gain the system. And here is a tip: Google is probably the company with the largest number of PHDs working for them, so if you really think you can cheat the system… Well, good for you! Knock yourself out!
But if you are trying to create a long-term business, don’t do that, don’t try to cheat.
I cannot use Exact Match Domain, and now what?
Ok, there is a lot of things you cannot do anymore! This is true, although once you know what you can’t do, you start to face what you should do with a better focus. Reason why I highly recommend you to read my best SEO tips for 2013 where I included some strategies that you should be using and also it can give you a better idea if what you were doing was legit or not.
But going back to exact match domain… why does Google is penalizing this type of website? Let’s me tell you why!
Most of them are Adsense sites, I mean, the owners are monetizing their website via Google Adsense. They were taking advantage of this big on-page optimization factor and were experiencing tons of traffic and in some cases, good profits from a not so good website. Do you think this is far??
I am hitting the end of this article about exact match domain name Google update and last but not least remember, for bloggers and website owners, we know “Content is King”, but after so many Google updates we can say that for Google’s eyes Quality is also King.
I hope you find this useful and if so, help me to share this message, tweet it, like it, and leave a comment below.
Oh, I am with a new website!! If you want to check it out just click the following link to learn more tips about Search Engine Optimization and Google Updates!
Thank you so much for that!