Do exact matter domain not matter anymore?
-
I need to buy a new domain and Im wondering if I should be looking at a exact matching domain or simply just some nice name. Did the last change from Google simply just lessen the importance of the exact matching domain or completely kill the importance of them?
-
I have a competitor that has 30+ site with EMDs. He uses the domain name to target the specific town he wants to market in. Let's say you buy Newyorkcityseo.com, you can then also use New York City SEO in the title, description, & keywords. Also any links with anchor text will be branded New York City SEO.
This still works really well for ranking high with Google, but it looks bad with to customers. Personally i would never go this route, but it does work. Like I said I have competitors that have been doing it for years, maybe one day they will fall.
-
Google described it as "turning down" how much EMDs matter. So although they probably do have a LITTLE bit of bearing, its nothing huge, if you have a brand name use that, if your brand name is close to the EMD then that should be fine. Just don't expect an EMD to help you massively when it comes to ranking like they used to do.
-
I think they matter but not as much as they did in the past
-
Just pointers... don’t rely on it... Google is changing fast and you never know when they might do that if they are not doing it at the moment...
If it matches your brand go for it but if not then prefer to go for a brand related URL instead of a keyword...
-
They do still matter.
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
-
How Much Domain Age Matter In Ranking?
I am very confused about domain age. I read many articles about domain age, some experts say domain age does matter in ranking and some experts say it doesn't matter in the ranking. Kindly guide me about domain age.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
Geo-target .ag domain?
Hi Guys, We are looking to purchase a .ag domain for a agriculture website, we want to target two countries Australia (primary) and United States. So the main site e.g. www.farming.ag (will target Australia) While the www.farming.ag/us/ sub-folder will target the United States From my understanding through after reading this: https://www.name.com/domains/ag .ag is for countries Antigua and Barbuda. So i was wondering can you even geo-target to Aus or even the sub-folder to United States in search console? Any advice would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Why is wrong domain being indexed?
We have 2 domains: revolve.com and fwrd.com (unrelated to each other, but hosted on the same server). If you do a site search for revolve.com but enter a designer brand that is only carried on FWRD (not on Revolve), the domain "revolve.com" pops up in the SERP, which is redirected to FWRD.com. Ex. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Awww.revolve.com isabel marant Why is Google indexing the revolve.com pages, which don't actually exist? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local. My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted. I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Is my domain scorched earth from Penguin?
http://pisoftware.com was never a huge leader of traffic, but it ranked top 5 for my money keyphrases, and was bringing consistent quality visitors. As traction went up, that traffic just became more valuable. I was happy. Then Penguin came along, and made me sad. 60% loss in traffic, I stayed calm. I disavowed. I sent emails asking for links to come down. I atoned for my sins (of the distant, distant past - I know better now) - and waited. Never a hard penalty, never an email from Google - just rankings that got hammered. From #3 for my best keyphrase for #25 today. I write content, and I try and write it better all the time. I try to make it valuable. I leverage social media to the extent that I can. I do outreach. I'm trying to be patient, but it's hard when the software is awesome, and so few people see it. I'm considering starting over - or maybe even just creating another domain to use if this one never comes back. I wonder on the thoughts of experts. At MozCon I talked to a lot of people in the same boat, and it seems we are all taking similar steps. So the questions: 1. Should I start over? Or stay the course? 2. What has worked for others - what seems to have been the most valuable in getting back on the rise? 3. Thoughts on the site as it is now? I've worked lately on speed, mobile rendering, etc - and it seems responsive and solid to me. Thanks in advance, you crazy bunch of Mozzers you. Kelly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kellster0 -
Issues with Sub domains for dealers
I'm starting a new SEO project and am feeling a little overwhelmed due to the scale of it. I am not sure where to start and hope that someone has some ideas. Thousands of dealer websites reside as sub domains on gravelymower.com/ (e.g. http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/) The particular sub domain mentioned above is not showing up at all for any searches and is not cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/ I realize that pretty much zero SEO best practices are followed on page and the location is not on the page, but why is this sub domain not even being indexed by Google? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BridgelineDigital880 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
New domain name for existing site
Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham0