SEOmoz.com is a bible when it comes to SEO publications and in a blog post today they had some GREAT news for domain owners and a warning that it could change.
The post is entitled “Are Exact Match Domains Too Powerful?, Is Their Time Limited?
Here are parts of the blog post, but you should definitely check out the full post for yourself.
“How big an issue is exact-match domains? Let’s look at some data from our correlation analysis from SMX Advanced earlier this year:”
“Just by itself, exact match is remarkably high in correlation to rankings. ”
“No other on-site/on-page factor we examined even came close.”
So far the all good news for domain owners.
Now for the bad news.
“Interestingly, some of the more experienced, ear-to-the-ground SEO types indicated that they’d heard (or believed) that Google would soon be taking action against exact match domains.”
“One person, who wasn’t at the event, but whom I trust a great deal (and will remain anonymous) indicated they thought the next 6 months would bring about this shift.”
I would say this is spot on, marrying good content + a targeted domain is a quick way to get immediate 1st page rankings. I think their caffeine update added to this variable last year.
Meanwhile our self-appointed domain king rants about the evil Google and Yahoo every chance he gets. Thankfully, for all his proclaimed glory, he is too small to be noticed by them. If Google really wanted to crush the domain business, overnight, they just remove any rankings boost for domain match.
maybe they SHOULD change it and have wikipedia and amazon come up first for everything.
Good stuff but its hard to beat the “credibility” an exact match has in the users’ mind. Especially true if there is a real business on the domain.
I’m sure everyone is aware, but it’s actually seomoz.ORG
Sorry to put the fly in the ointment
SEO is overrated? I believe in Search Engine Monetization.
The sites comes up and they make money. What the point of having gazillion hits but no sales?
Very informative thanks
“”What the point of having gazillion hits but no sales?””
I dont think you need sales to make a site worth it. You can always sell advertising space. Companies are willing to pay good money to sites that have great traffic.
I am not talking Google adsense. That is good enough to start off with but when your site reaches several thousand unique hits a day, you can venture out to other sources and more profitable means to advertise on your site.
I am sure this site makes a few bucks off the advertising that is listed on it and there is nothing wrong with that. They earned the right to make some dollars for their time and effort.
Good article. I believe that exact matches SHOULD have the benefit. Normally exact matches are worth more money. So you either have to pay more money for the exact match OR you can pay in TIME and EFFORT to have your site ranked with some SEO. Either witch way… you need to pay.
Changing that would be the wrong move in my opinion. It only makes scenes to keep exact matches as the greatest asset.
Just the way I see it.
Cheers
Now that I just thought about it. If they did this, it would mean the end of high prices for single keyword domains. They just wont be as valuable anymore.
That means a sharp downturn in portfolio prices for most domainers.
Imagine having something like 3d(dot)com, ranking well for the keyword 3d (as it should in my opinion… because it is 3d… hello) now not ranking at all and something like podunktownmakeshift3d(dot)com ranking in the number 1 spot for the term 3d.
I just dont see how that could possible make scenes. I mean its already possible for podunktownmakeshift3d(dot)com to rank for the term 3d but they MUST put in some major work to do it. They didnt spend the money or have the luck to purchase a premium domain such as 3d(dot)com.
There is NO reason for a change like this. Domainers (which I am NOT one) will loose the bank if something like this came around.
Just the way I see it.
Cheers
I’m not sure what, “Taking action against exact search domains…” means.
If the search query exactly matches the domain name AND there is rich, relevant content on the site, “taking action” against exact match domains is tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot.
Penalize for relevance? Yeah, that’s the ticket!
I agree, my VentureCapitalItalia.it blog (about the Venture Capital in Italy) always is in the first 2-5 places on the italian Google, Yahoo and Bing searches WITHOUT have done any advertising nor SEO campaign!
After giving this a bit more thought, it seems to me that today’s blog headline does a disservice to domainers. Unless your trusted SEO source can offer a plausible way in which “taking action” could be implemented without throwing the baby out with the bath water, what your headline suggests is that this situation may not last.
That’s good news for the SEO guys, but not the domainers. The burden should be on the trusted source to support this statement. Without such support, you headline has taken specific, documented facts representing, perhaps, the best domain news of the year – and starts a six month countdown clock that marginalizes it – on the basis of an SEO rumor.
For three years the SEO guys have been adament in telling me I’m mistaken about the very information that today has been confirmed by SEOmoz. So without time to even catch my breath, I’m supposed to believe it when they say that Google already has a plan to make it all go away?
The .com forwards to the .org
@ Slate said: If they did this, it would mean the end of high prices for single keyword domains.
It already happened. Google seems to favor websites where their content matches just about any words in the title and/or in the domain, be they left-of-the-dot, or to the right of the forward slash, or within the domain, or within the words of the domain, be it plural or singular! Or the keywords can be reversed, if it is two keywords. The reverse keyword domain will match the search, it seems.
Exact match keyword domain, esp. one without hyphens, still instills confidence in the company.
I can’t seem to locate the write-up for the life of me, but this has been rumbling through SEO for a few months now. Their complaint (not entirely unwarranted) was that garbage-farm pages with little to no user experience were outranking far more meaningful pages by sole virtue of the whatever boost they give.
The people at G are smart people. I’m fairly sure that in a room full of Google decision-makers, you’re going to have at least a few people who are above-average knowledgeable about the domain game. If you try to deconstruct their thinking on this, exact match boost makes sense, since whatever +/- criteria is assigned to domain dynamics within the search framework cannot possibly be refined any more accurately for user intent than when the domain itself exactly matches the query. I can’t believe that the decisionmakers at G were ‘unaware’ that a lot of (if not ‘most’) desirable, exact matching keyword domains were held in a speculative capacity and not being used for meaningful development when they made the decision to boost them in serps.
Who knows if they’ll do away with exact match boost all together, but it wouldn’t shock me to see them cut it back a good bit. The productive internet has been working around domain speculators since day 1 and finally, they’re starting to get pretty good at it. Seeing as ‘domainers’ are viewed somewhere between spammers and black-hat hackers in the productive internet world (if you don’t believe me, just step outside domain forums and into tech forms and introduce yourself as Davey Domain Horder… Make sure your Nomex suit is on properly), it shouldn’t come as any shock that the people working hard to deliver meaningful user experiences aren’t going to be too benevolent towards a community that largely subsists on zero user experience click farms and what they tend to view as smarmy keyword profiteering (on the latter, I disagree with them).
Between ccTLD boost and exact match boost, .us keyword domains have been sickeningly underpriced, relative to their ability to perform in the engines. Thank god for old, flawed mentalities…
@ LS Morgan
So if I was in that room of Google decision makers, it seems to me that the way it would go down is to punish the domainer and not the domain.
How?
Simply connect-the-dots in arriving at a domainer or speculator profile:
How many domains owned?
Where hosted?
How many domains parked?
How many domains for sale or lease?
In auction?
Is domain referenced in domain blogs & forums?
Etc., etc., etc.
Going levels and levels deeper will connect the dots of even the most sophisticated domainer/speculator controlled networks. Once branded a domainer or speculator, search engines can act against specific domains under the ownership and control of the suspected domainer/speculator.
Bad News: No more effortless first page ranking for domainers.
Good News: When the domain is transferred to the ownership of a non domainer/speculator, the penalty falls away and the Google exact match boost is restored ito all it’s former page ranking glory.
– – – – –
In a nutshell:
To penalize exact match domains without regard to the domain holder profile would be just plain crazy! So, they will favor a connect-the-dots strategy that punishes the domainer; not the domain.
(I’m NOT advocating… just attempting to figure it out.)
I hate to say it, but I hope Google does decline a great amount of these exact match domains that are just filled with advertisements and useless articles. The other day I was searching for some stuff and I don’t know how many websites were ranked top with exact match or near exact match domains and the website was cluttered with advertisements. The worst part was spending 3-4 minutes reading through the 300 or 500 word articles, only to find out they were filler content. Nothing was really relevant to what I was looking for.
i think the value of the keyword domain should have more value than a domain name with out it.
one reason is for .com’s there is only one domain name with these words so it has some scarity value there.
There may be an overvalue of keyword targeted domains name in SERP. but the value should depend are each category/market and what is being targeted (information , selling something and so on.
it looks like the balance of value of keyworld target domain names are changing and i think its a good thing
All the usual seo bleating about anything that is advantageous to anyone other than themselves, whatever changes they are employed to get over it. The spam seo experts do.
One word, content. A monkey with a check book can own an exact match domain site.
Thanks for covering this, Michael! I’m often surprised how many domainers don’t fully appreciate the extent to which the exact match domain bonus drives sales of keyword domains. If it is removed or reduced it could have the same kind of impact on the keyword domain market that declining PPC revenue has had on the traffic domain market (ironically both blows from the industry’s biggest partner…)
It would be easy to dismiss the SEOMoz article as rumor but for the commenter who pseudo-confirmed the rumors with Matt Cutts: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exact-match-domains-are-far-too-powerful-is-their-time-limited#jtc124595
If this changes it will be interesting to see what will happen with premium domain name prices for investors.
When search engines began feeding text ads to otherwise empty websites displaying only illustrations of yellow hard-hats accompanied by the words, “UNDER CONSTRUCTION”, little did these behemoths of search know they were setting in motion one of the greatest treasure hunts of all time, but instead of Gold Doubloons and Pieces of Eight, this modern day bounty took the form of highly prized, generic, descriptive keywords and phrases followed by a period and the letters, “.com”, “.net” & “org”. There be no fool’s gold here, but rich, digital bullion of the intellectual kind: DOMAIN GOLD.
What could not have been predicted was that this strategic move to monetize websites without content would virtually ensure that the majority of those pages, published to the most popular of all keywords and phrases searched globally by millions each day, would NOT be developed into the ultimate content rich ecommerce sites and information portals represented by the keywords and phrases contained in the domain name, but would instead become a testament to the treasure hunter and the anathema of the site visitor: PARKED PAGES.
In response to market changes and declining revenues, the parked page business model has slowly evolved over the years in an attempt to meet the ever increasing demands of the search engine algorithm taskmasters.
Today, mass development of domain name portfolios is all the rage. The domainer recipe for feeding an information hungry public largely consists of ad networks and affiliate programs combined with scraped content half-baked to perfection and served with an oversized pinch of SEO to taste.
What’s wrong with this recipe? Instead of satisfying the site visitor, this approach is largely intended to feed the domainer. The site visitor is simply a means to getting paid. Not a great strategy for restaurants – or domain names.
The domain industry still has the ability to control its own destiny by giving up parked pages and investing serious dollars into creating a world class, next generation monetizing platform, OPEN TO ALL, that turns these keyword rich domain names into the ultimate product and information portals.
It’s what the search engines want and what the site visitors deserve.
I’ve got plenty of ideas about how to bring this about. Contact me, and let’s put a team together to make this happen. The dollars it would cost to make this happen are nothing compared to the losses this industry will suffer if we continue down the path that puts the domainer first – instead of focusing on site visitor value.
Doing it right will breathe new life into those exact match domain names and give the SEO guys plenty of times to pursue other interests.
Any takers?