Has anyone here been hot by the Google Exact Match Domain update?

Any good references or recoveries would be useful to hear.

Normal SEO.

 

I think rather than get 'hit' they are just treated the same as normal non match domains.

 

Thats what my experiments and monitoring have shown.

I'm still benefiting - one of my projects is still top for its keywords/emd domain, however a few old clients sites have dropped a few positions (but still on page 1).

They're only targeting low level and spammy EMDs with thin content. If you have a good website with a solid SEO base then you'll not see any decrease in rankings

Yeah I would believe the domain still has more weight than the majority of other ranking factors - even more so when the domain is purchased for 3+ years at a time.

Edited October 15, 201213 yr by jamesosix

It's a good update. I'm bored of seeing domains like "low-cost-van-rental-company-uk-midlands.co.uk"

 

QFTW. It was big and clever when B&Q registered diy.com, not so much any more.

They're only targeting low level and spammy EMDs with thin content. If you have a good website with a solid SEO base then you'll not see any decrease in rankings

 

So what are you saying? That if a site owner has a good website, with regular relevant unique, quality content, and uses a white hat "SEO" company for a "solid" term they have nothing to worry about?

Edited October 15, 201213 yr by mylocaltrades

So what are you saying? That if a site owner has a good website, with regular relevant unique, quality content, and uses a white hat "SEO" company for a "solid" term they have nothing to worry about?

 

I had sites punished lately by penguin that had completely whitehat work behind it.

 

Google isn't always 100% perfect. No one is safe.

So you did no back link building or anything other than write good content? There would've been a reason behind you getting hit. You're right though, nobody is safe and Google serps are pretty volatile at the minute but the majority of people won't see a change.

 

There was a post somewhere on how to make sure your websites don't get punished. Ill dig it out latet

Thanks Jason - that would be useful.

To be honest I have never used spammy techniques at all - just some of the EMD now need more TLC to get them back up I assume.

Where as before it was alot simpler to rank.

But after analysing lots of anchor text ratios for over optimisation - it is really hard to see what is a good site and what isnt!

Has anyone here been hot by the Google Exact Match Domain update?

Any good references or recoveries would be useful to hear.

 

I think it's all about Exact match domain with low quility "content" so update unique content on website will help you to recover EMD effected domains early.

Derek summed it pretty nicely. When people talk about brand, in SEO, they mean their domain. Google give's huge weight to brands and that is why EMD's are still powerful and always will be. What they're combating here are blatant attempts to con the system by people grabbing a ton of EMD's and spamming them.

 

It would be unfair to devalue the power of brand domains as some people still actually use their actual business name in the domain (shock!)

EMD is Exact match domain is launched by septemeber 2012. Its basically a update to prevent from poor quality websites that regain your rank by using the domian name. New domian get gain rank with new quality content.