Once again, Google has targeted low quality sites in their latest update. This round of changes went after Exact Match Domains (EMD) with low quality content specifically. Since this has already been a portion of the recent Penguin and Panda updates, it really didn't take many by surprise.

In the past, exact match domains were the holy grail for webmasters. No matter the industry, if you could get a domain that had your top keywords, you automatically got a rankings boost. So if your business sold real estate in Boston, landing www.bostonhomesforsale.com would be an amazing find. Oh, those were the days :)

However, in Google's war against low quality content even an exact match domain won't keep you safe. Don't get us wrong, it's still automatic ranking credits - it just isn't enough anymore. Low quality is low quality - end of story and unfortunately most of the exact match domains have spun or low quality content.

If you're an owner of an exact match domain that is full of spun content, our advice is that you take the time to really build your site out as you're already a step ahead of competition. Or if you don't want to make the effort, then you can always shoot us a note when you lose your rankings and want to sell that domain :)

One example of a site that immediately dropped from the top position when this change was made is www.teethwhitening.com. The image below shows a screen grab from content on the homepage. As you can see, it's spun content set to bring someone ad income by tarketing high traffic keywords with no work on their part and worthless for human visitors.

It's official, the time of your domain name making or breaking your business has passed. We are now in the era of solid, fresh content dominating the results and if you also have a great keyword rich domain then life just got that much better for you. If you're having writer's block creating content for your site, check out this featured article, Must See Tips & Tools for Fresh Content Creation, Optimization & Distribution.

Remember this type of update is automatic which means that the search engine formula changed to reduce the rankings of these types of sites automatically. In other words, a reconsideration request won't help. Recent automatic updates (in order of their appearance) include:

• Panda - first rolled out in Feb 2011 and targeted sites with low quality content.
• Top Heavy - first rolled out Jan 2012 and targeted sites that had too many ads above the fold.
• Penguin - first rolled out April 2012 and targeted overly optimized sites (aka web spam).
• Pirate - first rolled out Aug. 2012 and targeted any site that had numerous copyright complaints against them.
• EMD - first rolled out Sept. 2012 and targeted sites with exact match domains with low quality or spun content.

On the other hand, if your site has a manual update (one that was given after a human reviewed your site and found something violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines) against it then you should receive a Webmaster Tools notice telling you. During the October Pubcon convention Matt Cutts was quoted saying...

"We've actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site."

So the first thing you should do when you notice a sudden drop in rankings is to check your Webmaster Tools Account for any notices you may have missed. If there is nothing there, then most likely you're dealing with an automatic update and need to bring up the overall quality of your site or deal with your anchor text profile.