This year has been one of the craziest ever seen in the world of IM, the whole industry has seen the game turned on it’s head, search engine optimization is no longer a skill – it is increasingly becoming a science. It almost feels as if anybody who owns a website or anybody offering SEO services has had to extend their brain capacity by 20% this year in order to cope with the fast growing list of new things that need to be remembered.

Many people without a website, or indeed anybody who was lucky enough to be  a ‘net’ gainer from Panda, were quick to praise Google for their ‘war against content farms’, or for winning a ‘battle against spammy content’, anybody with their ear constantly on the ground knew that a lot of good content was punished (and still is being punished) and in many cases outranked by scraped or even spun content. One webmaster that I know set to work deleting 5000 pages of content that he considered to be lower quality or no longer relevant, equivalent to half of his site, only to be punished in the process – probably as a result of a loss of some of his oldest and most mature backlinks. 

It soon become apparent that heavily competitive commerce related terms were becoming more and more difficult to rank for, with great content outranked by the likes of Amazon in #1, #2, and #3 in the Google results. One term that I track had Amazon in the first five positions at one stage, that’s bad news for any small independent retailer and any affiliate marketer, they had a hard enough time as it was trying to find the time and capital resources necessary to compete with the big boys.

There have been a few positives however, and one is that exact match domains appear pretty much untouched, if anybody should know it is me – I am primarily an affiliate marketer and the large number of micro-sites on my own EMD’s is precisely the reason that I no longer have the time to offer my SEO services to other webmasters. Exact match domains are in no way immune to Panda of course, the content is just as susceptible to the algorithm as it would be placed on any other domain, the point is that Google has not appeared to have reduced the weight of Exact match domains in 2011 – despite this change long being the most feared in the world of affiliate marketers.

My own exact match domains are ranking as well as ever, if not better, and in most cases it takes me little more than a month to outrank Amazon for moderately competitive search terms, I have been particularly successful with domains which use three keywords e.g. bestredwidgets.com. That is not to say that the change won’t come however, one day it will:

It will be interesting to see how Google approach this of course, such a change could potentially leave  a trail of destruction much greater than that seen from Panda. If exact match domains lose too much power it won’t only effect affiliate marketers, and in reality nobody cares about the affiliate marketers, it will also effect small offline businesses who use common sense domains such as sanjosegardeningservices.com in order to attract highly relevant converting customers. We also have the ask precisely what an EMD is, when a domain becomes an EMD, and what real benefit it will have to the users, the likelihood is that it will benefit nobody but the likes of Amazon.com and eBay.com again, who use ‘branded’ domains.

We do know that Google currently has unused technology to somehow seperate commercial and non-commercial domains, they have had it patented since 2003. The real losers however will be the major domain resellers, if exact match domains lose their power then all but the most brandable of domains lose their value, there will be no need for the likes of Sedo whilst major domain registrars such as GoDaddy.com would need to scale back their operations significantly, no more domain auctions, no more commissions from premium domain sales. If anybody can rank easily in any niche with the meaningless domain www.4kfmdnfdnngd. com, then the resale market for two or three word keyword domains will vanish.

It does scare many people, it probably should, but right now exact match domains can offer the means to easy money. Just don’t pay too much for them, they may become worthless one day.