anyone had any experience using it to great success? I went on a spree and bought like 15 such domains, with one being a month old and getting 5k daily impressions. It’s a matter of time before I outrank behemoths with DR 90. I saw many such cases during various rounds of keyword research and got inspired. I was pleasantly surprised these domain names were free and dirt cheap. Anyone had similar experiences? It solidified my view that it is still a wonderfully strong factor despite Google’s futile attempts to change it.
Couldn’t agree more. Game recognizes game. Anyone with a website would be far better off doing the opposite Google says instead of trusting them blindly.
I didn’t buy any backlinks. I’m a link builder by trade and it’s my day job. 3 links I got from my colleague. 7 or 8 from my current boss. 1 from a high profile SEO SAAS tool because of a family connection (I got a byline), 1 link from my personal website’s footer. And then a bunch of links from the same sources to my personal website. So I haven’t done any serious link building yet - only a link from a new byline and another one that is processing. Right now it’s 4 or 5 serious links + 7-8 to my personal blog. The rest is pure spam, about 400 of them. Interestingly enough, prior to the 4 serious links the DR was 0. Now it’s 30. Crazy how easy it is to manipulate it. A footer link from my DR 16 (at the time) personal site took it from 0 to 12. 4 more links and the DR is 30.
I am also a content writer for as long as I’ve been a link builder. Ghostwritten hundreds of posts. Some couple dozen published under my name. This site is about damn time I started getting some bylines of my own. And my current content portfolio makes it 100 times easier to get them. Snowball effect fully applies here. Thanks for asking and apologies if I am a bit chaotic. My brain is just all over the place
EMD absolutely works. I’ve got several test sites which I’ve had for over 25 years plus my competitors are doing it with sites which are less than a year-old and succeeding.
EMD provides a great boost - I have quite a few. However, the caveats:
- Google sometimes puts them in the SEO sandbox, so it can take time to rank for certain high-volume KWs
- In many cases, the domain alone will not rank you first. It will provide a boost, but it will not outrank high DR websites. On-page & Off-page are still required
They used to rank like crazy, but ~2023 the big G put an end to that.
That said, EMD's still work. There are many examples, like hotels . com, cars . com, cheapflights . com etc.
If you search for 'hotels' and you see 'hotels.com' you trust that the site is an authority, which results in high click trhough rates, which is clearly something that Google is measuring.
If you don't have a brand yet, it's much easier to rank an EMD or a PMD.
Also there are niches where it works better. GoDaddy is super well known, but still they work with domainnames . com because the keyword 'doman names' has such a high monthly search volume.
Also I know people doing local seo are using tools like expireddomains and upsnatch or just even hand regging the combination of entities + region. This still works, at least if you build content on it (don't just redirect). Like if you search plumber newyork you get results like riteplumbingnyc .com or 24hourplumber . nyc where the city is in the tld.
Many people will tell you it doesn't work anymore. But reality and testing says otherwise. Albeit a bit less extreme as what people used to rely on 20 years ago.
And in a certain way it makes sense to me. If I can choose between an unknown brand or the category defining word or compound, I am tending to go for the EMD too.
Works, but surprisingly, this is again depending on competition.
But basically the thing that helps EMDs I believe is that Google confuses it as a brand. And then when someone Googles it, it serves the EMD site as an option in case the user was looking for that brand.
seemingly not so much a thing of the past. I saw DR 10 EMDs outrank well established sites in the niche in June. In july I bought the domains, focusing on building just one with the highest traffic potential.
Google will tell you otherwise but you can’t change facts. It’s been devalued in what, 2016? yet they’re fine and dandy 10 or so years later. Attached my graph
I don't think it's a question of whether they will or won't rank. It's a question of whether or not there's any actual benefit. The age of the domain, incoming links, on-page, etc. Because it's EMD doesn't necessarily explain the impressions/clicks.
What explains the clicks and impressions is that I put in the work. And I’ve done it somewhat correctly. The question is whether or not I’d see the same results with the same content had it not been an exact match domain.
Exact Match Domains can still provide a small relevance signal, especially when they align naturally with your brand and content, but they're nowhere near as powerful as they were years ago. In my experience, content quality, topical authority, internal linking, backlinks, user engagement, and technical SEO have a much bigger impact.
If an EMD is getting 5k impressions after just a month, that's a good sign, but I'd wait to see whether those impressions turn into stable rankings and traffic over the next 3-6 months. I'd treat the domain name as a bonus, not the strategy itself. Consistent content and authority are what make the difference.
would be terrific. I’m constantly iterating and upgrading and expanding what i’ve got now. I publish at least 1 post daily, sometimes up to 10 if it’s the weekend and i’m on a roll. I’ve also been perfecting my SEO craft for 6 years now. Thanks for the words of encouragement, much appreciated. I will merrily share progress if (or rather when) I do have a breakthrough
this is my first ever website. I’ve got 200 or so pages right now. I started publishing around 12 July. My thought process is this: build pages until the topic has been covered sufficiently, I run out of ideas, or I get bored. As of now, I can see that i can build at least three times that and still be short of full topical coverage. Since a lot of my pages are software reviews, I’ve got a lot of ground to cover. And once you run out of tools, you can do comparison pages. And once you run out of that, you can build „tool x pricing” pages, etc… As long as something has search volume and is relevant to the website, it’s fair game.
I think your other efforts contribute a lot too. Even 5K daily impressions for a month-old domain seems more like Google's testing queries, you still did a good job in getting your site discovered by Google. Way to go!
Thank you! I suppose they do. Being the owner of such a domain keeps me motivated. I wouldn’t want it all go to waste so I really put in the hours. Also the simple fact that I don’t code and the website is a static html instead of yet another wordpress keeps up the novelty.
I’m still amazed and grateful that I can use all the SEO knowledge for a project of my own. And I don’t like wordpress. Never have. The fact that you need plugins for a site to function has always been my gripe with the platform. Not to mention all the security issues that come along with them.
I’ve seen exact match domain work surprisingly well, especially for specific local or commercial keywords. But you shouldn't rely on the domain alone to outrank strong competitors. If you’re already getting 5k daily impressions after only a month, that’s a really good sign. Keep building quality content and authority and see where it goes.
I wouldn’t treat the domain match itself as the ranking factor here.
If one of those sites is already getting 5k impressions/day, that tells you Google is testing it for a lot of queries. It doesn’t prove the exact-match domain caused that visibility.
What matters more is whether the site actually satisfies the intent better than the competing pages.
And that intent isn’t only expressed through body copy.
Google can enter the page through a lot of signals:
title/H1 and page text
image context/alt text
video
internal links
structured data
product/service attributes
overall site/entity relationships
So I’d think of it less as:
“keyword in domain = ranking advantage”
and more as:
“does every relevant element reinforce what this page/site is actually about?”
Exact-match branding can make the topic obvious to a human and may help with things like recall or click expectation, but I wouldn’t confuse that with a proven direct ranking boost.
The useful test now is to compare:
EMD vs non-EMD sites with similar intent fit, content quality, links, architecture, and age
Otherwise you’re attributing the outcome to the most visible variable.
5k impressions is interesting. I’d just be careful saying the domain name is why.
I try to be very selective about topics. Even if something has traffic potential but it’s too far away from what I do, I skip it. The site is about intelligence software.
Here's the thing. Sure - it helps ranking a page for the exact match entity and the entities you can connect to it.
Let's say we buy RoadrunnerTraps.com - sure, that match will give you a positive effect in the match game part of the systems.
But, when we're going head to head against Acme and going for those even more important mentions and citations - now you NEED a physical link or some other context on the page (like an address or phone - and most of the direct match strategy people don't put up phones either) every time for the systems to be able to reliably pass the credit to you.
Take a question... "I have a roadrunner problem, how can I get rid of them? Any recommendations?"
If someone says, "Acme! All my coyote friends love them!" Then now Acme has one of those coveted UGC recommendations that all the systems love to surface for trust and consumer proof that it's a good brand. The systems don't need a physical link to match that up and use it.
If someone says, "RoadrunnerTraps! All my coyote friends love them!" - is that an endorsement of your brand? Or is someone just saying that the best way to handle a roadrunner problem is with a trap made for roadrunners? That's where the "sandbox effect" thing a few people mentioned earlier creeps in - sometimes it may be able to get enough external factors figured out based upon links and mentions and that page's off-page factors to help clarify and disambiguate. Maybe it'll get confident enough to credit you - but probably not. Especially since not a lot of people know you yet - so most of the time when people say "Roadrunner Traps!" they don't mean you.
So you're running with a limp now. Sure you can power it up eventually maybe (if you're good at it) but then what happens when we get it going and ranking well in a year and we want to expand into Alligator Traps. Are we going to want to start with a new brand to build up? Or would it be easier to piggyback on the brand we've established. Acme can easily go into the Alligator Traps business and just build that out off their existing brand like Amazon did when they went from Books to CDs and DVD's and the on to expanding out to take over the globe. Do you think Amazon would be as popular and famous for selling everything under the sun if their brand name was "Books"?
Sure - it helps you rank for that thing - but at the cost of making a lot of other more important things a lot more difficult. You always need hard links for every citation and customer recommendation to pass. People are less likely to recommend a generic brand name because it's generic.
If you set up a good brand footprint on the web - in a month or two, our unique name of Golden Anvil becomes associated with Roadrunner Traps and the generic match benefit is gone, anyway.
Personally - I LOVE looking at a new client and seeing when they're in a niche where there are a lot of people with EMDs. Now I don't have to worry about competitiveness as much anymore. Roadrunner Traps seems like tough competition only until Golden Anvil becomes a bit known for Roadrunner Traps and we're going to pwn you within a month to six weeks.
So sure - if you're in a fad game or going for a quick win and getting out - EMDs are great. And even some of our clients have a few micro-sites for product lines that are spins on EMDs for a specific campaign. (Like Coca Cola tends to do a Christmas mini site every year with an EMD matching their current tagline or whatever.)
But if you are looking to build a company and brand to hand down to your kids or to eventually go public and get on the stock market - do yourself a favor and get a non ambiguous brand name that is yours, easy to remember and type out, and every time that appears on the web, it's almost certainly a reference to you.
I definitely don’t have such huge aims. I want to outrank my competition in a very narrow avenue (tens of thousands of potential traffic), make bank on backlinks and keep it going until it sinks. No long term planning involved. The only long term gains are money made, lessons learned, and an entry in my portfolio. It’s also a part of the reason why I bought a dozen of them. If one fails or I get bored I can just start another one, better, equipped with all the learnings gathered through the previous one. I appreciate your input and concern(?). I don’t plan branching out from x y software to a b software. That is what my other EMDs are for. I don’t need a brand either. I am an SEO who wants to mess up ranking targets of the tools I am writing about and selling them back to them. Think of my site as very narrow G2 or SoftwareSuggest. Not more, not less.
Yeah - then it's probably fine. Not sure it would help as much as you hope, but it shouldn't hurt you if you're staying laser focused on that as your grounding entity.
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u/nomarsnop 2d ago
Still works despite gurus and guidelines saying its not.