Exact Match Domains Post Penguin
-
I was wondering if it is still worth it to use exact match domains to rank for a desired keyword after the last penguin slap and if so, what would be the best strategy.
Thanks!
-
Exact match domains are definitely still worth it. Check out this case study on a couple thousand sites, which shows that exact match domains suffered LESS from Penguin than other sites:
http://www.jonathanleger.com/anchor-text-optimization-how-much-is-too-much/
Penguin tends penalize sites that spam anchor text exact keywords, instead of a more natural link profile that includes your branded keywords. However, when your brand IS your keywords, then it's very hard for Google to penalize you.
-
Thanks!
-
From my experience, the best way to get links with an exact match domain is to create some of the best content on the web for that topic. When people see that an an exact match domain they tend to link to it more readily than similar content on JoesWidgetShop.com.
I build content instead of links so I can't answer your question. As a result, most of the anchor text pointing to my site is stuff like....
exactmatch.com here this site etc.
-
Thanks!
Would it be ok if i build links only with branding anchor text (which is the actual keyword) and with the URL as anchor text?
Or should i vary them more?
-
Most of my domains are exact match and penguin didn't bother them. I my opinion, penguin was more about anchor text and low-quality linkbuilding jobs.
In my opinion exact match domains lost a little value about February 2011... but otherwise they are good domains and worth paying extra to get them. They convert better for me than other domains and when I own a nice domain it gives me energy to work on the site - and that is the secret of those domains for me.
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
-
Forecasting DA increases after merging domains?
Hi all, I wondered if anyone had any suggestions for forecasting DA changes after merging two domains. The context is that we have two sites and there is argument to combine them into one. To cut a long story short, one of the considerations is how much DA might increase if we migrated one domain into the other. Domain 1 has a DA in the 30s. Domain 2 (which we'd redirect) has a DA in the late 20s. Around 90% of the LRDs are 'incremental'. Surely there is a way to forecast what the increase in DA would be if we decided to combine? I haven't found anything online...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Parking page for domain names
Hi all, I represent a hosting company which has thousands of domain names that is parked for the clients until they start using them. Currently we are presenting the client and visitors information about the situation in the top of the pages and we have placed information about all the main products in the last part of the page. You can see an example here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | proisp-no
http://prodesign.no/ Would you recommend utilizing these pages in a better way than how we are doing today (SEO wise towards our own website)? We have the ability to instantly change all of these pages at once and we are also able to present different pages for every single parked domain name if we want to. Best regards,
Jon0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
A Tale of Two (Competing) Domains
Bit of a weird one but I'm hoping someone can help our team of two sort it out. I'm a copywriter/marketer who's been learning SEO on-the-go, along with our web developer, for the past ~9 months. We've inherited what I consider to be a mess of a situation involving two main e-commerce sites. The company has a sporadic history of spinning off brands, in hopes to either build business in a new market or sell the brands off or what-have-you. The original company rose to prominence manufacturing disc packaging and selling it to software companies, which has obviously been on the way out for some time now. So they've dipped into a handful of other business products for marketing/office use. The company used to sell all products, in individual AND box quantity, on one site (since 1996). In 2012 they decided to move individual quantity sales to a different site with the domain name of one of the brands, focus it more on consumers and small business, etc. We have more flexibility to make changes to the consumer site, so in my opinion it's in better shape. The consumer site (DA 39) offers "retail pricing" with flat rate shipping and free shipping over $25. The b2b site (DA 37) offers "industry pricing" with a weight-based shipping model. Traffic on the business site is down 70% since 2010. We've also been asked to take certain products down in hopes that viewers will pick up the phone and buy a customized version from a sales rep instead. Since probably 3/4 of the products are on both sites, nearly all the category and product pages are competing in SERPs. Not only that, but the business site's product pages invariably link to the corresponding page on the consumer site -- hundreds of links pointing to the consumer site. We know for a fact that people are price checking product+shipping between our own two sites. The issues are further exacerbated because we have even more spinoff domains -- an informative site for a particularly successful product line, an e-commerce site just for vinyl products, etc. etc. So I guess I'm trying to figure out how to make the most of the situation we're now in. Our hands are somewhat tied because we're not 'decision makers'. But we've got a meeting tomorrow to talk about the future of one of the sites, so I figure I at least want to be informed. I am concerned about making further decisions without considering the consequences, especially when our bonuses are tied to web sales... I feel like this is just scratching the surface of the problem so let me know if you guys have further questions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UEUP0 -
Optimizing WordPress Pages With List of Posts
A friend of mine has published a new site called www.localsguidesa.com. It is an informational/review site about a resort town. Most of my experience has been dealing with single html pages. In the case of this site, the main "money keyword" pages are mainly an introduction of text followed by a list and snipped of blog posts such as this page http://localsguidesa.com/what-to-see-do/attractions which would target St Augustine Attractions. Would she be better off making the main pages with more content and less blog posts? How would ranking be affected with all the preview blog posts on the page? The strategy is for the blog posts to rank on the longer tail keywords...such as "Top 10 Attractions in St Augustine ", but what suggestions would you have for a main navigation page such as http://localsguidesa.com/what-to-see-do/attractions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pinlaser1 -
Renaming your domain from an existing live domain and SEO implications - Please Help *shudder*
Please see the details below. Site A: http://south-african-holiday.mobi is an existing site that is our best site. It is Joomla 3.1 and runs all our ecommerce. Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky. joomla 1.5 and all bookings (tour site) are redirected to Site A for processing. Instead of redesigning the Site A I'd like to change the domain name of http://south-african-holiday.mobi -> http://southerncircle.com So far my reading and research (Thanks MOZ for awesome forum!) has provided me with: 1. Do the SEO groundwork. i.e. remove dead links from both sites. Delete useless content and generally tidy up both sites. 2. Map all pages from site a: http://southerncircle.com -> http://south-africa-holiday/ so that the existing pages that have good ranking will have a home on the new site. 3. When ready do a small sample 301 redirect from: http://southerncircle.com to http://south-africa-holiday.mobi. 4. arghhhh now I'm stuck ..... If I redirect to this site then I lose my http://southerncircle.com domain which is what I want to keep....I just want the .mobi site to move to the southerncircle.com site.... I don't consider myself totally thick but this is really confuseing the *$%# out of me PLEASE could you give me some insight here. I'm sure it has been done before without completely losing the sites seo ranking and sending my site into SEO oblivion. If there are any JOOMLA gurus that have done this I'd love to hear from you as well. Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoutherlySwell0 -
Confusion about domain extension.
Hi, need bit suggestions from you guys. After researchi found a KW that have some good Lcoal search volume.. My question is should i buy the CLD as it has good LS volume or i should go for .com , .net etc. Becasue as i know that LS means that number of people searching form that location(based on IP) not number of people searching in that local version of google. So no need to go for CLD as it vl help only in local version.. Bit confused waiting for reply thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Big_Zee0