Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome.

Speaker 1: 0:29

Back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, hosting, and today I'm going to talk about exact match domains, mainly because I can't believe I've never done an episode about exact match domains. I was just going through the backlog. You know stuff we've posted in the past thinking, yeah, I must have done one on exact match domains, but obviously I clearly never have. Now I know I mentioned it in the glossary um series that I did exact match domains, but that was only sort of touching the surface um of what an exact match domain is and it really it's a subject that deserves its own podcast, so let's dive into it now.

Speaker 1: 1:00

Exact match domains are one of those things which can cause a bit of controversy in the SEO community, mainly because some people have very strong opinions for or against exact match domains. So let's first of all define what an exact match domain is. So an exact match domain is a domain that exactly matches a search query okay. So, for example, when we had broadbandcouk, that exactly match is the search query broadband okay, now, that's obviously a very high level one. You might find others, like plumbers in london okay, so you could buy a debate name plumbers in londoncouk, orcom or whatever you wanted and that then is the exact match domain for the query plumbers in plumbers in london. Okay, so we know what they are. Now. It used to be. If we look at the history of it, going back I mean, we're talking 12 years ago, at least 12 years ago it used to be that having the exact match domain for Queer Search Query could give you, and would give you, quite a boost in search.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Now, back in 2012, just checking the exact date, just checking the exact date yeah, in the 27th of september 2012, google launched what they called the exact, the exact match domain update, the emd update, and matt cuts, who was the equivalent of john mueller, is nowadays. He was google's first ever search liaison type of person, matt cuts report on twitter. He said a minor weather report, small, upcoming google algo change will reduce low quality exact match domains in search results. Okay, and at the time google said this will affect 0.6 percent of english search requests are affected by this update, which sounds like not many, but that's sort of what. Just over one in 200 searches it affected, so one in every 200 searches. So you consider how many searches um happened on google every day. That's that's actually quite a lot of searches that are affected by it.

Speaker 1: 3:14

And this is because back, you know, sort of prior to sort of that, prior to september 2012, it was very prevalent that you would see um. You know there's lots of thin sites being created where people would buy the exact match domain and quite often on some very weird and, you know, cheap top-level domains like infos and things like that and net ones that people didn't use very often, and they would cover the exact match and put like a one-page thin site up there. That was just purely specifically to target that one query and wasn't really about much else. And again, this is around the time when they were doing panda, when google were really into trying to hit thin content and they wanted to improve the sort of content that they rank, and so going after exact match domains like this was one of the things they did. And then this exact match domain system became part of their core ranking systems and it's mentioned in their sort of ranking systems guide. They say the exact match domain system, and this is quoting from that. It says our ranking systems consider the words in the domain names as one of many factors to determine if content is relevant to a search. However, our exact match domain system works to ensure we don't give too much credit for content hosted under domains designed to exactly match particular queries. For example, someone might create a domain name containing the words best places to eat lunch in hopes that all the words in this domain name would content high in the rankings. Our systems are just for this.

Speaker 1: 4:48

Now a lot of people have taken that update back in 2012 and this paragraph in their core ranking system documentation to say that google penalize exact match domains and you shouldn't have an exact match domains, and that you shouldn't have an exact match domain because it will be bad for you. Now this is where my view is slightly different from that, and I know that there are others that share my view. I'm not. I'm not alone in this view, but those of us with this view probably in the minority, I'd say. Because people read this and they go oh right, google have hit exact match domains in an update before. Therefore exact max domains must be bad, and they have said that they will adjust. Part of their core ranking system adjusts for exact match domains and it makes it sound like it's in a negative way.

Speaker 1: 5:40

But if you read those words carefully, they do say our ranking systems consider the words and domain names as one of the many factors to determine if content is relevant to a search. Right, okay, that's what they start with. They are telling you there words and domain names are one of the factors that they use. That it's a positive thing. If it was a negative thing, they wouldn't have to have this dampener okay that they talk about later on. So they then say because of this, we make sure we don't give too much credit for content hosted under domains designed to exactly match particular queries. So what they are saying here is we consider the words and we credit you with those. So if the words from the domain name, then we credit that, but we do have a little dampener to make sure we don't over credit it, okay. So in this, what they're saying is, yes, the words in your domain name are considered part of the ranking rhythm and it can be beneficial, but we just make sure that it's not too beneficial.

Speaker 1: 6:41

And if you go back to what matt cut said, like in his tweet, he was talks about where the content was thin okay, whether a low quality content, okay. So from this we can deduce clearly that you could have exact match domain names and have the keywords in your domain name and if you've got decent enough content, it will help you, right, okay, so exact match domains are not a bad thing in and of themselves. They are not a bad thing In and of themselves. They are not a bad thing, okay. And yeah, we had broadband at Cutit UK that had the keyword broadband in it. Any search anyone did around the word broadband, you know we had that keyword in the domain name and I'm pretty sure that it helped us. Okay, we had great content, we had a great backlink profile, we had lots of other things SEO-wise that helped us, but having that broadband in the domain name did not hinder us at all. If anything, it would help okay, even if you didn't get any credit at all for exact match domains the fact that people would link to us as broadband at codeuk a lot of the time just with the url, you know. Then we've then got that keyword in the anchor text of the links that are pointing to us again, which would help us along those lines.

Speaker 1: 7:54

I've done other sites, plenty of other sites, with keywords in the domain and it's never, ever hurt. I'm doing some experiments at the moment. I think you've heard me talking about rank and rent recently. I'm doing a few little experimental sites just to see how difficult it is to rank for these. Rank and rent kind of like local, hyper local searches and things like that, and I've been putting keywords in the domains. I've used some exact match style domains and they rank for the, for the exact match to the domain. Okay, and these are sites I've started. They're very new content and some of them isn't great yet because it's just some almost like a holding content. Okay, it's not awful, but it could be a lot better. And they are ranking for the domain name, they're ranking for the key, for the phrase that I've put in those and these, like some of them, are two, three word uh phrases and they rank for those two or three-word phrases and they haven't got a backlink profile yet. So it's purely coming off on-page content and from the strength of the domain name. Okay, so it does work. Does it work in hugely competitive marketplaces, hugely competitive topics? It will be harder, like I say, with broadbandcouk. We didn't just rank for broadband terms because of broadband in the domain name. That was too competitive but it didn't hurt. But no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be going after them for that on that respect.

Speaker 1: 9:21

A few other things to consider. Okay, a lot of exact match domains have been registered and just being held on to by um domainers who ask silly money for them. I wouldn't go to the point of buying exact match domains for huge amounts of money. There's always ways around it. Put a hyphen in there to get around um issues where you know the domain isn't available. Look at plurals, look at adding another word on two things so you can get the exact match in there with another word can make it sound more branded. But yeah, I'm not into paying domainers huge amount of money for an exact match domain just because it's an exact match domain that the benefit you get is. I don't think worth that amount of money.

Speaker 1: 10:04

Now I hear some people will say what about brand? You have to have b brand. You shouldn't use keywords in your domain name. You need to build a brand and okay, that's not necessarily wrong if that's what you want to do. But it depends, I think, on your context. I mean you can build a brand around exact match domains. You can build a brand around words like this so, for example, broadband at Cutty UK. We built that into a brand. Around words like this so, for example, broadbent at Cutty UK. We built that into a brand. It became a brand. You know it was a recognized brand and we sold it as a brand. Hotelscom. You wouldn't say that isn't a brand. You know there is loads.

Speaker 1: 10:40

If you think about it, there's actually loads of big brands out there that started with a domain name and turned their domain name into a brand no-transcript. Take any town name, say Buxton place in Derbyshire, near where I live Buxton, buxtonplumberscouk, buxton, plumbers could easily be a great brand if you're a plumber in Buxton, because it explains clearly to everybody what you do and where, okay, that's a brilliant brand. If you're like a local service like that, you know is it going to be one that's necessarily going to scale world. You know, to take over the whole of the UK probably won't. But if you're a plumber and you don't want to scale that far and it's really hard to scale to cover the entire country even pimlico plumbers, which is again a fantastic example. If you're not from the uk you've probably never heard of pimlico plumbers, but they're one of the biggest plumbers in london. Pimlico is an area of London and they built their brand on being Pimlico plumbers. They're the plumbers in Pimlico. Okay, they've expanded it to cover quite a lot of London and the guy who set it up is a multi-millionaire now and you know it doesn't need to cover the whole country.

Speaker 1: 11:50

So having, um, a sort of a descriptive local, especially locally um place name is not necessarily a bad thing. And if you're looking at rank and rent, which I know more and more people are, then to go for those kind of descriptive, location-based domain names is probably a really good thing to do because it will give you a help Because at that local level you aren't competing so much with massive UK-wide or country-wide or whatever, or worldwide or worldwide brands. You know you're especially for sort of service level businesses that lots of these ranking ranks go for you're. You're really working only against local, local competitors and local brands and you can build that local brand around the domain name, no problem, and it won't and it certainly won't hurt when it comes to ranking. And even if I'm completely wrong and Google do not give any credit or boost whatsoever for the exact or partial match of keywords in a domain, then just having that domain name will get you links where people will just link to you with your domain name and those keywords are in the anchor text. That will not hurt at all. So, yeah, that's where I stand on exact match domains. It may be different to what other people are telling you but again, with all these things, always just go back and do the research around why people might say something and then read what google and others have actually said about something and you can read between the lines there and actually figure out the right message or at least the the best, have a better, more educated guess at what the real message is, rather than just blindly listening to someone who just tells you something is bad or something is good with no reasoning why. Anyway, I hope you find that useful and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode Before I go, I just want to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have.

Speaker 1: 13:53

You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is Not that Hard. Is brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeakleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.