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Search on "santa cruz custom cabinets." In my SERPs, I'm seeing exact match santacruzcustomcabinets.com rank #2. This is a 1-page site provided by Yellow Book as part of an ad it sold to this cabinet shop. The site has no other pages, no inbound links, etc.

So much for Google saying it's going to turn down the meter on exact match domains because that's all I see this website, if you want to call it that, has going for it.

what do you see? Why is it ranked so high? Why is it above the site below it for example? And why doesn't Google lower the boom on Yellow Book for these doorway pages?

Thought you'd all find this interesting. Any comments?

I'm thinking of changing my client's 37 character exact match url because it looks spammy to me and Google says it will be turning the dial down on exact match domains. I still see a lot of value in it however and it is helping this client, albeit very little since he is new in his arena. His goal is to rank for keywords in that url so I hate to lose the benefit of that url. As an example, let's say his url is floridahealthinsurance-quote.com

I'm concerned now because I plan to do some reputable and highly relevant link building and I'm afraid bloggers might hesitate linking to a spammy sounding url.

This client does have a branded url that is short and sweet, something like millerbenefits.net, and that redirects to the long url. Back linkers could link to the short url instead. However, it lands people on the site with the long spammy-sounding url and they may not want to be affiliated with it.

Something like millerbenefitsinsurance.com is available and it does have 2 keywords in it. Should I get that instead?

In short the question is this:
Should I change or keep floridahealthinsurance-quote.com

If I should change it, should I change it to:
millerbenefits.net
millerbenefitsinsurance.com

Thanks for your help!

Thanks, Ryan. An upgrade was my first recommendation to them as well. I found some advice in the Google Webmaster forum. Apparently, hackers hide some code on a file deep in the site, then add an include statement in the header. I need to remove the code in the header, figure out how to keep them out, then clean this out of Google's index which, unfortunately, might be the hardest part. Any tips on that? I don't want to de-index the entire site.

In performing a link: to my site, I found this:

Video Of People Using Viagra - Online Drug Store, Guaranteed Shipping

<cite>www.planetherbs.com/affiliate-program.html</cite> - Cached -Block all www.planetherbs.com results1 day ago – Video Of People Using Viagra. Online Drug Store, Guaranteed Shipping. Check Order Status. Natural and healthy products!

If you go to that url, you will see it's just an affiliate program page.

Some viagra spammer somehow changed the title and description metatags that google sees (not actually) and links from what appears to be spammy pages are pointing to me. I don't want to get dinged for this. How do I fix these for myself and planetherbs.com? And how did the spammer do this???

Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site?  Has anyone  experienced problems doing this?

Loved this article on the subject. Check out the hashtag tip. http://www.seo.com/blog/testing-link-priority-rule/

One way to do that is create a "Service Areas" page where you list all the cities you service. From there link from the city to a city-specific page that lists your services. Make sure the content is original! On that page you can add location-specific anchor text such as "Denver plumbing services" or "Denver heating repair."