Exact match domain names
-
Hello, Someone approached a client of mine to sell a exact match domain name for a very competitive and high converting keyword. Would this be of any use and what are the best tactics to employ if it is purchased? I was of the opinion that the 'power' of exact match domain names are dying fast but would be interested to hear what people with experience in this think and what they have done with them (i.e. set-up a website on that domain or re-directed it)? Thanks, Rikki
-
Thanks for your help all. Decided not to buy the domain and keep going with things as they are!
-
I find it infuriating that spammers are still able to get their hands on exact match domain names
I've bought a few of these domains and had to pay a freeking fortune to get them. The fact is, however, I decided that I wanted them in 2005, 2008, 2011 and the people who I bought them from had owned them for a long time collecting ad revenue from the type-in traffic. Their price was waaay waaay more then the appraisal but if you want the domain and know how to use it you can make a freeking fortune back.
Should google give them a ranking advantage? I think the answer is yes, a small advantage and anyone who wants that advantage can obtain it simply by paying the price to get them. If you are willing to pay or was smart enough to register the domain early then that advantage is your reward.
-
I find it infuriating that spammers are still able to get their hands on exact match domain names and leave the actual brand sites who exist within the niche looking for business rather than click throughs suffer in the SERPs! Will Google eventually phase this out?
-
They still have value, you can usually get them to rank quite easly, but if they are spamming like THB suggests i would not bother.
But are they cheap? if so, you may be able to resell them. I have a few that i am sitting on till i get the right offer.
-
My thoughts exactly (and other great points by other comments here).
There are many factors that go into this issue, and of course, I'd love to have say, houses.com or realestate.com for a website that was offering real estate for sale. But that doesn't mean that I should create some long-winded, keyword-stuffed domain name (real-estate-and-homes-houses-for-sale.com) as that will not do anything for my cause.
I'm sure, as everybody has pointed out, that there is still some consideration into the domain match for the genre in question; however, domain name are basically impossible to come by nowadays for any popular/common item you are planning on building a website around. I'm sure the search engines have also thought about that.
But in all honesty, look at a lot of the major players in any niche, and majority of them have a unique, highly-branded name that doesn't have anything to do with the industry. Not to say you shouldn't do it, but with a legitimate link-building campaign and top-notch SEO tactics deployed throughout the site, you can rank for anything under any domain name.
-
I own several exact match domains. I can say with confidence that they used to be very powerful in ranking a website. However, google has turned down that benefit significantly as recently as this year. I do think that they still give some value - but only for exact match queries.
I like them for reasons beyond that....
-
in my opinion they have extra good conversion rates because people who land on them think... "Oh... this is widgets.com... they must know their stuff about widgets."
-
this implied credibility - even if undeserved - makes them a better target for likes, links, tweets, mentions and they can easily become the "go to place" for their product or topic if you are willing to put work into them
-
finally, they give me mental energy.... If I owned baloney.com I would become the world's expert on baloney and build a fantastic site... if you own a domain like that you owe it to the domain to do a good job.
So, I would be willing to pay a good amount of dough for an exact match domain ... but only if I am the right person to control it. I would not want knitting.com or even wine.com because I don't know anything about these subjects.
-
-
Exact match domains can be good, but I do agree they are becoming less powerful compared too say 2 years ago.
You can still get the following with a EDM:
-
Good for branding
-
Great for type in traffic selling Auto Insurance, 2-3% of people direct type in domains example autoinsurance.com
-
EDM SEO ability still evident yet it is dropping.
-
-
I think, exact domain name, is not bad, if you down white-hat strategy to rank it higher, it's nice, but if you use spam tactics its bad for exact and non-exact match domain name.
for example if you search "shoes" on google.com you will see the domain "shoes.com" on 1st or 2nd position on 1st serp. this is not bad if you down the right seo for a domain.
for the keyword "seo" is the same too.
from my side, take it, down the whitehat tactics seo, and finish that's all.
-
I think you're right that Google has discounted the value of exact match domains now as it's not as easy to increase rankings solely on the merit of the domain alone. However, I don't agree that exact match domains aren't helpful at all anymore. I see cases all the time where exact match domains are very higher in search rankings in Google. Value of having the exact match domain may be "dying," but I wouldn't say it's dead yet. If this is a new domain with no domain authority, it does you no help to simply redirect from that domain to yours regardless of how good the keywords in the new domain are. At minimum you would need to build up the new domain to get any value out of it (unless you you want to buy the domain just to ensure competitors don't get a hold of it).
-
I’m new to SEO but wouldn’t it still help? If you are trying to rank for the keyword "pickles" and your url is pickles.com, every link back to your site will contain the word "pickles" because its in your url. Where as if your site was called peanutbutter.com and you weren’t able to change the tag it would say peanut butter. Wouldn’t Google say pickles is way more relevant to pickles than peanut butter is, wouldn’t they give the pickle url more consideration? Again new to SEO and I might be missing something here.
-
Thanks THB. You re-confirm what I was thinking really but it's just when they are offered I think they make you think about it a bit more. Would be interested to hear any other views on this?
-
You are correct in that "exact match domain names" are dying out, and that is due entirely in part to spammers (don't they just ruin everything??). It's all about branding now, which means you can basically have any domain name you want and rank for anything you want. Mind you, you're not going to see cars.com trying to rank for telephones anytime soon, but you know what I mean. While it might be tempting, it is not necessary to have your niche keyword in your domain name anymore. Last I heard, Bing was the only search engine actually taking these things into consideration, and that was over a year ago, so I'm not sure whether they still do.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
How to build Domain Authority?
My site: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/ has started to drop Domain Authority in the past weeks, however less quality sites like http://silverstories.com.au/ are rising... I am not sure why? Is there someway I can understand why my site would suddenly start dropping authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Brand name in title of posts?
Hi All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
new question about my blog: in my posts title I have to add the brand? for example -
The title of the post | My Brand name
Or just the title without the brand? Because my post title too long and I know that Google show only the 60 characters. so it will show like this:
The long title of my post | My Brand n... (just for example) is it okay? or for 100% optimization I have to keep it 60 Characters and no more. What do you think? Is it bad for my brand? good?0 -
112 exact match anchor text internal links in the sidebar
Hello, My website has 112 internal exact match sidebar links for my targeted keyword. I rank nr.5 for this keyword in Google and i was wondering if i should remove those links or not? I know that footer link are no no but i am not sure about sidebar links. Any ideas? Regards, InigoOÜ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InigoOU0 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
Multi domain redirect to single domain
Hello, all SEOers. Today, I would like to get some ideas about handling multiple domains. I have a client who bought numerous domains under purpose of prevent abuse of their brand name and at the same time for future uses. This client bought more than 100 domains. Some domains are paused, parked, lived and redirected to other site. I don't worry too much of parked domains and paused domains. However, what I am worrying is that there are about 40 different domains are now redirected to single domain and meta refresh was used for redirections. As far as I know, this can raise red flag for Google. I asked clients to clean up unnecessary domains, yet they want to keep them all. So now I have to figure out how to handle all domains which are redirect to single domain. So far, I came up with following ideas. 1. Build gateway page which shows lists of my client sites and redirect all domains to gateway page. 2. Implement robots.txt file to all different domains 3. Delete the redirects and leave it as parked domains. Could anyone can share other ideas in order to handling current status? Please people, share your ideas for me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0 -
Domain Name with Numeric Digit
If I use a Domain Name with a Numeric Digit, would it in any way harm the SEO and Google Ranking of my page? This Question is only from point of view of SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranBatra0 -
Duplicate content on sub-domains?
I have 2 subdamains intented for 2 different countries (Colombia and Venezuela) ve.domain.com and co.domain.com. The site it's an e-commerce with over a million products available so they have the same page with the same content on both sub-domains....the only differences are the prices a payment options. Does google take that as duplicate content? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0