Are you still seeing success with EMD's?
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I am curious if any other SEO's are still seeing success with exact matching domains.
I am not seeing ANY changes to any of my clients rankings since the "Exact Match Domain" filter came about in September.
Also while I have conducted SERP audits in my neck of the woods I am noticing EMD's are still doing very well.
What are you seeing?
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One of my EMD's is outranking my main site for a low competitive keyword without much of a link profile at all. It's a very simple site only one page, but has very unique content. It was more of a site to just play with, but for not much work it ranks first for the phrase over about 10 other sites that appear to be optimizing to the keyword.
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Same - EMDs that have real content and a real site are doing fine. EMD "penalty" if you want to call it that, affected more the people who are just putting up simple microsites or filler/fluff sites on emds.
The biggest thing I've seen affect EMD is domain age. Domains over a year or two old seem unaffected. New EMDs with under a year left on their registration have been slammed hard. EMDs with thin content are definitely under the gun. But anything "real" seems unaffected or only minor hits here & there.
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From what I have seen, Google turned down the EMD benefit in February 2011.
Spammy EMDs were tweaked back a couple months ago (let's say those on the border of a Panda problem or a Penguin problem).
But if you have an EMD with good content the domain still gives you some advantage.
When I use "EMD" I am referreing to domains like DigitalCameras.com and not to domains like SamsDigitalCameras.com for the "digital cameras" querry.
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