Exact Match Domains – Do they still work – Part 2

Exact Match Domains are they still working well after the ‘Panda’ Update?

Well I set off to find out at the beginning of this month and I suggest you go and read the first part of the casestudy to get the importance of EMD’s, why we should or have been using them and how I setup the experiment.

Where we left off and where we are now

On the 13th of March the rankings were as follows:

And on the 28th of March they were this:

What we can see is that Google rankings have settled down to what it was on the 10th of March once the new EMD had replaced The Nexus’s listing. Further the rankings for Bing (I omitted Yahoo as well B and Y share results now) also jumped up a nice few positions to the top 5.

This seemed by looking at Google Analytics’s ‘Intelligence’ Data to have happened around the 26th where a 48% increase was seen in pages views (and around 27% increase in visits).

You will notice that the article (the one I 301′d over) accounts for 91.4% of the sites traffic, why I bring this metric up? Well it means almost 10% is coming to the videos section which was created using my Automated Video Sites technique , proving 2 things:

1) Dupe Content still brings traffic
2) Automation still works and RANKS for longtail traffic.

Further Rankings

Now when I set the site up; I did a bit more KW research and plonked it in for tracking as well, while I have no data historical data on the KW’s it was nice to see them slowly rising to.

Links!!

Since the EMD went live it has also garnered its own links. Why are links so great especially for a EMD’s ?

Well some people don’t use anchor texts! Which we all know is a vital link ingredient, the benefit with EMD’s is even if they link to you devoid of all anchors i.e. http://domain.tld your keywords are still in there! which is great

Conclusion

Considering that while the the post was on The Nexus it always hovered around 4-5 mark and since the 301 to the EMD the EMD has bounced around from 2-5. Hopefully with some more natural links (as it seems to be getting on its own) it will get to the no1 spot and beat that damn wiki!

Also since the EMD it has also started picking up a fair bit of Long Tail queries to, so +1 to EMD’s.

Caveat

While looking at the results after just a month we can ‘conclude’ by looking at the results that the EMD did have an effect on rankings and bumped it up about 3 spots (and we know how hard it is to increase ranking within the top 10).

The one ‘flaw’ in the experiment was the setup of the Automated function to keep the site updated. The aim of this was to keep the site crawled at least once a week. The issue being it added its own weight to the domain which (unlikely at a month old) could lend some authority.

The counter to this caveat being we were tracking the posts ranking not the sites as a whole and therefore it did not play a part in the effecting the posts ranking.

So to sum up:

1) EMD = Seem to add a little extra push to the rankings.
2) A Targeted site can rank for more longtails.
3) Automated Video Sites can still work.

So keep EMD’s in the arsenal or at the least domain names that contain your main keywords.

Over to you, how are your EMD’s doing? and Will you buy a few for your Arsenal?

(Check out my Resource Page for a  Market Samurai Promo Code and a Namecheap Coupon two vital tools that will help you FIND and SAVE on EMD’s)

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