Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012
The above tweet was tweeted by Matt Cutts last Friday and has caused a little a stir in the wider search ecosystem. The truth be told is that Google’s has been cleaning house for over a year with both Panda and Penguin. This EMD algorithm update is a minor tweak in a trend that has seen low quality sites fall all over the place.
Those in the ORM (online reputation management) business like myself should have stopped over using using exact match domains for their clients a while ago. That doesn’t mean that a person’s exact match domain won’t rank very high for them, but it will be treated with much more scrutiny in order to make sure the results are not being stacked. After all Google is all about useful results and a result that has no useful information on it will not rank no matter the domain name. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but expect the trend to continue. Like I have been saying, the free ride has ended.
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- How to Read the Panda Update Google has been swallowing up the headlines as of late....
