Exact Match Domains – Do they still work?

I touched upon the importance of Domain Authority and TLD unimportance before and thought hey lets have a crack at Exact Match Domains (EMD’s).

Now i’m not going to rehash what EMD’s are, why they are great and ‘oh so powerful’ as its been done loads of times. Cliff notes version:

• EMD’s Target ONE primary keyword
• EMD’s can take more keyword links as it is its domain name.
• EMD’s have little to no ‘Brand Value’

Due to the points above EMD’s are seen as Gold Mines for Niche Sites and during Niche Research it is an common to grab a EMD on your primary keyword (there are tools that help you find these) as they tend to rank faster.

(Images from SeMoz)

Mr Cutts himself has this say on the EMD v Brand Topic (7th March 2011):

Now if you are still on the fence, let me just give you a bit of color. that we have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, & some people have complained that we are giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. So we have been thinking about at adjusting that mix a bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given 2 different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain name with a bunch of keywords in it. – Matt Cutts

So while I recongise from reading (and past experience) that EMD’s work well, though G has been saying possible devaluing them. So then I thought lets give em a shot after the new G update and see if they work still and ofc keep a tally of the results.

The Test

I’ve had one post on the The Nexus that had been getting a few thousand hits a month. This traffic was not ‘on topic’ and was not really monetised in any way.

Though it garnered some natural links to it, a few hundred comments and was stuck on #4 in Google for its primary keyword ‘How to use Cheat Engine‘ and had been stuck on that position for months.

In other words the perfect candidate to see if porting the post to a EMD for the primary keyword would have an effect.

The Setup

During the period I would be building NO extra links to the site at all (or after the period even) so to try and determine the EMD’s power.

I setup the new site http://howtousecheatengine.com on the 01/03/2011 and ported the post over. I did a 301 redirect from the original to the new post.

Between the 5-6th I did a bit of tinkering with on site setup and ported the comments over.

I setup up an ‘video’ section using a method similar to the one detailed in my Automated Video Sites post and set it to post a new video every day to keep the site ‘active’ and ‘spidered’.

Initial Results

After the post was 301′d there was a drop in ranking for Broad match across the board, though the Phrase match jumped up to #2 for Google (which is always a good indication of where Broad match will reappear).

So the 301 was picked up within hours it seems though the site did not appear in the SERPS quite then.

Now if you compare the above screenshot with this one, you will see on the 7th is when the new site appeared in the SERPS in Google and by the 10th The Nexus’s listing to the page was replaced by the new sites which was now at #2 in Google though still suffering from a drop in Yahoo and Bing.

Also a side effect I noticed was that the secondary keyword ‘cheat engine tutorial’ Also saw an increase.

Conclusion

On the 13th of March the ranking for the site were as follows:

Just to clarify what you are seeing the ‘top’ line is for the redirected post and the second is for the domain itself.

The 301′d Url is still bouncing around in the SERPS and seems not have settled, though compared to last week the rankings in Bing and Yahoo are on the rise again.

We also see that the actual domain name has started ranking for the Primary keyword to, appearing in the SERPS in the mid 80′s. Hopefully when it starts garnering some more natural links we can aim for the ‘double listing’ somewhere.

The question is then do EMD’s still work? well in 2 weeks time we have seen a ‘new’ site hit mid 80′s in the SERPS with no link building (though a natural link has appeared) and the 301′d post seems to have bounced up a bit in G as well. The answer? well lets see in 2 weeks time where it stands!

What are you experiences with EMD’s? Are they easier to rank?

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