A few days ago Google made a small change to its search algorithm (the program it uses to calculate and deliver search results). Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, made the announcement via his Twitter account.
The change is aimed at filtering out low quality exact match domain (EMD) websites that rank highly because the searched phrase matches the domain.
Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012
He also tweeted this:
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
This algorithm change is something Google has talked a lot about over the past few years and now that it’s arrived many people have seen their rankings and traffic disappear in an instant. On the other side of the fence, many more people welcome the update.
Too many internet marketers create crappy sites with thin content just to make money from AdSense, affiliate links or to boost the rankings of larger sites, and it is these sites that Google wants to remove from its results. Think of paydayloans, make money online, weight loss, viagra and you’re in the right area.
Quality is the most important factor
The important phrase to remember here is “low quality”. It’s not an attack on every single website operating under an exact match domain (EMD), it’s only an attack on websites operating under an exact match domain that Google considers low quality.
Quite what Google considers low quality is open to question – it could be the lack of social shares, the amount of information on the page (including images and videos), or the data it captures when searchers click on a link in the search results, such as how long the searcher stays on the page they click-through to.
It’s probably a mix of these signals and a few others too.
Exact match domains at local level
In the UK there are thousands of business websites operating under EMDs – think of any trade or business type and add a location. It’s likely these sites will be hit by the algorithm change too, especially if they are the typical five page setup that never changes. For these businesses the change is harsh as they have typically followed the advice of SEO experts or the guidelines they’ve read online, which often talk about the importance of an exact match domain helping to achieve high rankings.
At the time of writing this it seems UK results are not yet affected. Read Matt Cutts tweet again:
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
My understanding of this is that it refers to results for US searchers on Google.com and not UK searchers on Google.com or Google.co.uk, but it could also mean the results for phrases made in English-US [language/spelling] across the entire Google network.
What to do if you’re hit
If you have seen a drop in rankings during the past few days, or you fear your site may get caught up in this change, and your site has an exact match domain, then you should start thinking about ways to improve its quality. It could be as simple as creating a few more pages, updating it more often, creating videos, increasing the length of your existing content and providing more insights into the topics you cover.
What you have to remember is that this is not a penalty, more a wake-up call and a notice to care more about the end user experience.
And finally
This is Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, in a video uploaded on 7 Mar 2011 and talking about domain names and their relevance to search. In the video he talks a lot about branding, but he also says this:
We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it.
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