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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
Redirecting main www. subdomain to new domain. Can you then create a new subdomain on the old domain?
Hi there, The scenario is this: We have been working on a rebrand and have changed the company name So, we want to redirect www.old-name.com to www.new-name.com However, the parent company is retaining the old brand name for corporate purposes So, in an ideal world, we'd be able to keep www.old-name.com active - but clearly that would sacrifice all of the authority built up over the years, so we do have to redirect the main www. subdomain in it's entirity. However - one suggested solution is to redirect www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com... but then create a new corporate subdomain: for example, business.old-domain.com business.old-domain.com will not be competing with the new site on any service/product related terms; it will only need to appear in SERPs for the company name I'd appreciate some thoughts on this, as I've not done this before or found any examples of anyone that has. Is that a massive risk in terms of sending a confusing message to Google? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Merging domains into sudomains
I know that questions about this topic have been asked before, but I didn't really find an answer that I could apply to our situation. We have several websites that now exist on separate domains, even though their topics are closely related. We are moving each of these sites into a new CMS and are considering collapsing all of the domains into a sub-domain structure around the strongest domain. Important to note: All of the current domains have existed for many years and have strong site authority, and regardless of the domain decision, in this restructuring we will be bringing them all under a global header. I know that there are SEO risks to moving a site from an established domain to a new one, even with 301 redirects in place, but the team in charge of this move wants to know how much of a hit we would take and how quickly natural search traffic might recover. Maybe and mights aren't really satisfying their questions... Does anyone have experience with collapsing domains into a sub-domain structure and feel like sharing your results? Most importantly, was it worth it???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuliaG0 -
How to deal with competition with a similar domain name as my client website?
How can I deal with other websites that have a keyword domain name similar to my client website? I get a few domains similar to my client domain name just to avoid the same issue, but there are a few others ranking for the same keywords and I don't want posible customers get confused with a similar domain name. I have social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and etc), but they are not ranking on the first page. This is the situation: www.domain.com that would be my client's domain. And the competition: www.bestdomain.com www.thedomain.com www.domaincomapany.com And a few more. At this time my client is ranking #1 position, but all the others ar 1 or 2 positions bellow.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0 -
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 -
Sub domain versus separate domains, which is better for Search engine purposes?
We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites. The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website. Our options: Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season. Or Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary. We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong. Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach. Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees? Your comments highly welcome. Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill-Duff0 -
Legit Domain Masking
I am working with a real estate client. They have one main site (ie. company.com) that contains all the info, then they have several name domains (ie. salesrepresentative.com) that are forwarding to the main site, but use domain masking to appear as if there is a separate site for each representative. My question is how can I make this legit in Google's eyes, or is this totally not advised?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukao0