Recently Google Spam Master Matt Cutts hinted that low-quality exact match domains could be penalized. This is aside from either Penguin or Panda, and as far as I know doesn’t yet have a cutesy animal name that starts with P, like Platypus.
An “exact match domain” is one in which the keyword is used as the domain name. A simple and almost meaningless example is for a company that sells yellow golf balls, and uses the domain “yellowgolfballs.com”. Supposedly, this is a suspect domain name, since it matches keywords that are logical for searching, and until now, was actually encouraged for your SEO marketing efforts. Some algorithm from Panda or Penguin would test the quality of the content on the site, and if it’s deemed low, would essentially ban it from search results.
A Real World Exact Match Domain Example
How does this apply to a realistic situation? Let’s go for the simplest example I can imagine. Ed the Plumber. Ed is a hypothetical local plumber who has been in the same town for twenty years. You’ve seen him driving around town in his big white van, labeled “Ed’s Plumbing”. You know who he is and what he is, and your family has been using him for two generations. One day at the dawn of the 21st Century Ed decides to get a website, and in the interest of simplicity, buys “edsplumbing.com” and has it painted on his truck. Like any other service industry professional, he lists what he does, what his service area is, what his hours are, and his general pricing structure, about ten pages on his website.
So is this a “Exact Match Domain”? What do you think people who are trying to find Ed’s phone number will type into the search box at Google? “Ed’s Plumbing” and that then becomes the keywords you are searching for, and blam, it’s an Exact Match Domain. So now let’s review the quality of the content. The list of a plumber’s services is probably fairly generic, and is probably almost word-for-word duplicated on thousands of sites, as are the hours, and probably a hundred businesses list the same geographic locations. Ed is probably pretty busy fixing pipes and stuff, so he’s not generating a dozen fresh, exciting articles each month on relevant exciting plumbing topics, like “advances in wax ring technology since 1952”. Not only that, but in all honesty, most everything in your house plumbing-wise hasn’t changed a lot in the last fifty years. The odds of constantly generating exciting fresh content are slim to none.
Inbound links? How is poor Ed supposed to get quality organic inbound links? Spamming blogs would probably work, if he could find some relevant home repair blogs, since relevance seems to now be important for inbound links, but then Ed is pretty busy doing pipe stuff. It’s not like a lot of people outside his town would stumble across Ed’s ten page site and put up links on their own – even with the wax ring articles. It’s especially not like the portal sites are doing all that well right now, which could give Ed a share of links with other plumbers for relevance mixed in with their spun articles.
So poor Ed, getting banned from Google, just because he has a valid site, with a valid URL, and a valid business, being searched for by valid customers using valid keywords. Illogical, don’t you think?
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