Your Exact Match Domain Won't Keep You Safe in this War

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,