Google Gives Dodgy Exact Match Domains a Slap
As is oh-so-typical (courtesy of timezones) Google issued a potentially important update while I was out last night in a bar! Because I am completely sad and pathetic, this of course meant that my evening was paused for 5 minutes while I read a bit about it and shared it on Twitter and by email to my colleagues. Yes, I am that sad. But that’s besides the point. The update is designed to penalise poor quality exact match domains; it should prevent poor quality websites from rankings just because they have a domain with the exact match keyword in it.
These were the Tweets form Cutts that caught my eye while I was out last night:
Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012
New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012
It’s going to be really tricky for Google to get this right, I think. It needs to be able to differentiate between brands and websites using non-brand exact match domains. So whether or not it gets it right this time, we’ll see. But I’m sure there’ll be a lot of fine tuning to follow.
Who’s Affected?
The idea of this update is to penalise poor quality exact match domains – so not brands and not sites using exact match domains but where the content is actually of some value.
I’ve read some material about a site called pregnancy.co.uk dropping out of the top 100 for ‘pregnancy’ (despite the content actually looking decent).
As yet though, not a lot else to report on. Will be interesting to see what further info surfaces over the next few days.
