What do we do now that exact match domain has come to stay

Since Friday last week, the whole news on the internet has been about the recent Exact Match Domain (EMD) issue made mention by Matt Cutts, owner of the big G. Many have complained bitterly while some have given credits to this new update. But did we see this coming?

Matt Cutts actually announced on twitter before the update that he is going after some low quality exact match domains. See below for the exact tweet he made;

What Does EMD Mean?

A lot of people have been asking what this exact match domain mean and of what use is this going to be on search results? Well, the little I can tell for now is that EMD are websites that contain keywords that exactly match the search query. From what we can see from this new algorithm, Google is trying to limit those websites with low quality contents with the aim to reduce the amount of low quality exact match domains in search results.

But just as search results are trying to clean up the system, a lot of webmasters have also reported to have been hit. I read an article from Buzz Blogger which gave an insight into some of the comments made by a few people who have been hit by this update. Here are a few of these comments;

Comment #1

“I just did a search for a two-word phrase that gets about 60,000 searches a month.

There’s an exact-match .net ranking #6 that has ZERO content. All it has is an H1 with the primary keywords, a link to a related Wikipedia article, a link to their twitter feed and a Google+ “recommend this” button with 9 votes.

That’s it. Yeah, really, that’s it. Nothing else. And it is not well-linked at all either. Very few links to speak of.

What was that about “low quality” filters?”

 Comment #2

“2 sites gone. One 3 years old. Ecommence bags site, completely unique content. All hand written. 200 words on each page. I am lost on what Google wants and i have been in this industry for 15 years. Before Google even.

Oh, and Bounce rate good and time on site good. The products are all high end mens bags that are not in the normal stores but Google want to show just the same bags but from large retail sector shops.”

Comment #3

 

“I know exactly how you feel, the Google somehow fails to see the original author, imagine this- My site is five years old, and there comes one blogspot blog (one month old) that copies my entire posts from three years ago and ranks number one for these while I’m nowhere to be found…I’m shocked and disgusted, have already sent copyright claims but I can’t do this for eternity, this algorithm is one huge mess…”

Now That Exact Match Domain Has Come To Stay, What Do We Do?

Well, in my last blog post, I wrote about the idea of over optimization and keyword stuffing. From the look of things, this seems to be the new SEO method. A lot of web owners have been over optimizing using too many anchor texts, heading tags, over optimizing images and employing aggressive link building. All these are sure to start getting you websites ranking low. To save your site from this tragic update, people need to start learning to get used to synonymous optimization rather than focus on high density keyword phrases. Just as Matt Cutt stated, “We don’t need to bother much about keyword phrases as we have integrated a system to do a lot of synonym work so that we can find good pages that don’t happen to use the same words as the user typed.”

So, think smart pals. You don’t need to be exact no more to get good rankings. Get top quality domains, build links and write quality contents the normal way and you’d be sure to be EMD safe.

I would recommend you find time to read some of these articles

Matt Cutts Announces Google Algorithm Update

New Google Update Kills Exact Match Domains

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