Buzz Term January 2013: EMD

Do you know what an EMD is and what its positive and negative attributes are?

It is an acronym for Exact Match Domain. For example, let’s pretend you are in the used toupee business and you have the chance to secure www.usedtoupees.com. That’s an example of “exact match” web domain – what you sell or do is reflected in your domain name.

A couple of year ago, we would have advised you to GO FOR IT! By the older rules, reflecting what you sell in your domain was a huge positive factor that was a big influence on organic rankings.

As of September 2012, many sites with EMD’s have been penalized in rankings. Google’s thinking: sites with poor content got artificially higher rankings because of the perceived worth of their EMD – even sites with GREAT content got penalized in this update – simply because of their name.

The lesson leaned: Constantly Improving the quality of your website content is a cornerstone strategy to improving organic rankings – no matter what your domain name is.

 (Editors Note: Yes, we DO have a client with an EMD that was randomly spanked. How we fixed that is another story – for another month!)