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According to Matt Cutts, speaking at a recent PubCon, Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well. For example, if you have a site at blue-widgets.com it may rank a bit too well for the keyword phrase [blue widgets].

Curious.

Don’t Google know?

More likely, Matt would not make a concrete statement, one way or the other. “Yes, exact Match domains rank better!”, is not something Matt is likely to say.

Secondly, the implication is that exact match domains are a problem.

Why Use Exact Match Domain Names

Exact match domains names, as the name suggests, are domain names that match the search keyword term. i.e. Hotels.com, shoes.net, planetickets.org etc.

Is it a good idea to adopt this strategy for SEO? Ask ten different SEOs and you’ll likely get ten different answers.

On the plus side, an exact match may help you target one, specific keyword phrase. Your link text and domain name match up naturally. The domain name will likely be highlighted in Google’s search results, thus giving the listing more visibility. There may be ranking advantages, depending on who you ask.

On the negative side, an exact match only “helps” you target one keyword. It may be too generic for wider applications, such as brand building. Exact match domains may be over-hyped, and not worth a premium. There are, after all, many domains ranking #1 that aren’t exact match, so it is debatable how much SEO advantage they actually provide, particularly as Google keeps pushing brand.

Is There A Problem With Exact Match Domains?

So why would Matt imply exact match domain names might be a problem?

It is understandable that some in the SEO community – perhaps an SEO working on client sites, or those who don’t own any exact match domains and see others ranking above them – would have a vested interest in making a noise about the competition. If webmasters make enough noise about it, then Matt Cutts may feel a need to respond.

The supposed ranking power of exact match is probably a red herring. The problem Google may be hinting at is that exact match may be more likely to be involved with spam, thin affiliate, or other low value content than other types of domains. In other words, it becomes a quality signal.

If that is the case – and I’m not saying it is – then that may be the reason Google would look closer at exact match domains, not the fact that a domain matching a keyword is somehow evil.

Because it isn’t.

There is nothing wrong with owning an exact match domain.

Should You Buy Exact Match Domain Names?

Aaron covered this question in an earlier post, Why Exact Match Domains Aren’t As Important As Many SEO’s Believe.

In summary, it depends.

It comes down to business fundamentals. If you’re trying to build a unique brand, and resulting keyword stream, then an exact match domain name will be a hindrance rather than a help. You’ll forever be competing with generic search traffic. Keyword domains names aren’t particularly memorable.

The premium that an exact-match domain name commands, when sold on the after-market, may not be worth it. You don’t need an exact-match domain name to rank well, so the money may be better spent getting a new $10 domain name to rank. Or, alternatively, you could buy an existing site that already ranks well for your keyword, and others, for similar money as an inflated exact match domain.

Finally, if you’re competing with a clear market leader, then generic isn’t going to help you much. i.e. owning searchengine.com isn’t going to make Google lose any sleep. You may also be over-looking an opportunity to differentiate your offering against the market leader in terms of brand. Think Blekko vs searchengine.com.

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SEO domain name, exact match, exact match domain, match domain names

Its day one of SMX and were ready to begin in the SEO track with a head to head, no holds barred battle between Google and Bing. Blood will be shed. Marketshares will be insulted. Mothers will weep and hide their children.

Or perhaps Im just feeling a bit bloody minded because were down two livebloggers this week. Both Lisa Barone and our own Virginia Nussey are on the DL for this conference so Im going to do my best to be in three places at once. Well have some emergency liveblogging help though, so keep an eye out for coverage from familiar industry faces. Barry Schwartz has decided to step up and liveblog as well so there will be coverage at SER for the watch it as it happens fans. The SMX team has reserved the entire front row for livebloggers and press so Im sitting pretty with coffee, a bagel and power.

But enough set up. Heres the main event. For the first session of the day, weve got moderator Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land, ably assisted by Q&A moderator Duane Forrester, Senior Program Manager SEO, Microsoft. (Hey, isnt it a conflict of interest to have an MS guy doing the Q&A?)

Our Speakers:

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft

This fine cast of search brains will explore the battle of the only two engines that will soon matter once Yahoo goes away (sorry, Ask).

Danny starts off I feel like Liza Minelli in Sex and the City 2. Silence. Half of you saw that, ten percent were dragged to it. Hee. He teaches us how to use the Conference Guide (Read the page that says Read this first first.) and how to use hashtags on Twitter #smx for the conference, #1a1 for the particular session.

Janet Driscoll Miller is up first. Shes going to be doing the very high level overview of the session, setting up for Rand to get into more detail.

Why worry about Bing?

Were turning into a two engine world. Bing and Google have a very similar usability profile. But Bing outperforms Google in many areas except for search volume. They still dont send a lot of traffic but they do send good traffic.

Bing v Google for SEO tactics

Similarities:

Both dont do well indexing Flash still.

XML Sitemaps: You should be using them. Theyre a universal standard and you should learn how to use them. You can submit your Sitemap to Bing and Google through their webmaster center/central.
Bing does not currently accept video or news Sitemaps.

Local indexes are easy to submit to.

Geolocated results: Bing will tell you the source, you can use that to figure out where you need to be to appear in their results (snow conditions from OntheSnow.com, etc.)

Both have sitelinks but only Google allows you to edit them.

Differences:

Bing Webmaster Center: Sitelinks, outbound links, link value on inbound links gives you insight into what Bing values in links. (You can only download the first thousand results.)

Getting into Bing news: Theres no formalized process yet. You have to email bns@microsoft.com and create an RSS content. It may take a long time to get a response. Keep pinging.

Google Shopping/Base = Free

Bing Shopping = paid only. Also, Cashback is going away.

New opportunities for Bing:

Social sharing and results: Search for polar bears brings up images and theres a share on various social networks functionality. However, the links are back to Bing, not the original image. To post on Facebook, you have to grant access to the Bing application on Facebook.

Document preview: Allows you to put more marketing data in there. You can put really great information in the preview and entice people to click on rollover. YouTube videos will play on roll over.

How do you optimize the preview? Bing pulls information in this order:

Takes the H1 if it doesnt match the Title tag

First paragraph of information

To add contact info, just add that information to the page Address, phone, email. Theyre good at figuring it out.

To disable the preview, add to the page.

Rand is up next to explain the nitty gritty differences between the engines. Hes covering ranking factor correlations: Google vs. Bing.

Methodology: 11,351 SERPs via Google AdWords Suggest, 1st page only (usually 10 results a page), Correlations are with higher position on page 1, Controlled for SERPs where all or none of the results matched the metric (for example, controlling for .org or .edu.) Data came from commercial terms, almost no brands.

Understanding correlation significance: 1 to 1 is perfect correlation, ie thats the only thing the engine cares about. They didnt get that. Mostly it was less than .3

Note: correlation does not equal causation. Just because something has negative correlation it doesnt mean that you need to change it or that you should ignore it.

Query matching in the domain name:

Their conclusions: It appears that Bing has slightly less correlation with exact match in the domain name overall. Exact match domain remain powerful in both engines (anchor text could be a factor, too.)

Hyphenated versions are less powerful, though more frequent in Bing (G: 271 vs. B: 890) (IE, they show up on the first page more often in Bing but they rank better in general on Google when they do show up.)

Just having keywords in the domain has a substantive positive correlation.

Exact match domains by TLD .net vs .org, etc. If youre going to register an exact match domain, go with the .com. The others dont have as high a correlation.

Keywords in subdomains: Higher correlation for Google than Bing (in fact, almost inside the standard deviation) but nowhere near as high as ExactMatchDomain.* Keywords in the subdomains are not nearly as powerful as in root domain name. (There is a typo on his slide and its driving me crazy. Less THAN, Rand. Not less then.)

On-Page Keyword Usage: (scale changes here maximum of 0.06 with a negative correlation in some cases)

The ALT attribute of images is interesting seems like it should be part of best practices.

Putting KWs in the URL is probably also a best practice.

Everyone optimizes Titles, differentiating is hard.

(Simplistic) On-Page Optimization isnt a huge factor [Um.no. It means everyone on the first page has relatively equal on-page. Not that you can ignore it. That's why it's called a best practice.]

Links:

High correlation in # of linking root domains to URL.

Links are still a major part of the algorithm.

Bing may be slightly more nave in their usage of link data than Google, they seem to care more about raw links.

Diversity of link sources is important.

TLDs:

.org has high correlation, .edu has low correlation.

Length:

Content length: not substantial

URL length: negative correlation

Raw content length seems marginal in correlation

Long domains might not be ideal but arent awful

Shorter URLs are likely a good practice, esp on Bing.

Website home pages: Bing likes home pages more than Google does (over internal pages).

Anchor text:

# of links with exact match anchor text very low correlation for both

# of linking root domains again supports diversity. Very high correlation.

Features with highest correlation:

Link attributes have a much higher correlation w/ rankings than on-page or domain-related elements.

Exact match is still a powerful influencer

Google and Bing are remarkably similar you dont need to optimize differently for them really.

Now its time to go to the search engines and hear their take.

Matt ums and uhs for a moment and calls Rands data interesting. He says you shouldnt chase after search engines, you should chase after user experience. They joke about how they should have done a correlation on Wikipedia in the number one position and Matt thinks that Bing shows Wikipedia than Google.

Matt also cautions that SEOMozs data is very niche and not at all broadly applicable. If youre thinking long tail or non-commercial spaces, you need to think more critically about the data. Matt also tweeted this: Im on an #smx panel about the differences between Google and Bing. Heres my quick take on the topic: http://goo.gl/tRdE

Sasi agrees with Matt and says its not about more bing-like or more google-like. Its about whats right for the user. They would focus on different metrics than SEOMoz, They would focus on things beyond seo metrics. Query rate, long tail, etc.

Rand says that if youd like to have more information on any metric, you can email them to have them add it to their sample. This data came after the Mayday release (it was done this past weekend).

Someone asks if Bing will kill Yahoo Site Explorer. Sasi says theyll have the functionality still and that SEOs are users too. Danny asks if people would use Bing to get Yahoo Site Explorer data, about half the room says yes and Danny tells us that if it goes away its because we didnt raise our hands.

Matt and Danny clarify again that Yahoo and Bing will have identical organic results (refer back to SMX West).

Matt: Numbers at the beginning of your URL is harder for branding. If you can find a nice brandable domain, that would be a little bit better.

Matt: Google is going to be looking at Video Sitemaps more closely and they will be really trying to get videos indexed particularly with Google TV coming in the Fall.

SEO Bing, Bing news, exact match domain, google

Ever wondered exactly how important your sites address is to your sites success? You might have changed to search engine-friendly URLs as a part of your SEO efforts, but studies have shown that your domain name can have an impact on every form of traffic for your site.

Your search engine optimisation consultant is likely to work with your URLs to make them as search engine-friendly as they can. You can discuss this with us at SEO Consult. There is only so much an SEO professional can do, however. The best thing you can do is choose the right domain name. Research has shown that the right domain name should be an exact match domain.

In a simple study, a catchy domain was compared to an exact match domain name. The traffic of the two was measured on a monthly basis over the course of one year. You can probably guess the result. Not only did the exact match domain outperform the catchy domain, it did so by a significant margin. Heres what the study revealed:

*Exact matches are more successful than quality content

The site with the catchy domain was packed with interesting, quality content. The exact match domain, on the other hand, was a simple page filled with advertisements. Most of the content hadnt been touched for months at a time.

*Exact matches tend to build business quicker

The study showed that over the course of a year the exact match domain site went from around 23,000 clicks a month in January to a high of 92,000 clicks in December. The catchy domain site, however, went from 20,000 clicks in January to just under that in December, with a high of around 22,000 in March. Although some allowances have to be made for the individual approaches and appeal of the two businesses, the exact match domain achieved a huge result without any extra marketing.

*Exact matches are seasonal

One interesting thing the study showed was a significant fluctuation in traffic for the exact match domain. Although traffic grew overall, the exact match domain experienced a dip in February, a steady decline between March and June, another dip in July, and a sharp decline from 92,000 to 60,000 clicks between December and January. The catchy domain, meanwhile, had a fairly steady flow of traffic. Its an indication that if youre relying only on your exact match domain without any SEO, you could be in trouble now and then.

*Get an exact match, and you may not have to worry about the search engines

The study indicated that sites with exact-match domain names get lots of direct traffic. This takes the pressure off a little for those sites when it comes to the search engines. Of course, a smart site will always try to top its competitors in the search engine results. Having an exact match domain name also gives you an edge when it comes to SEO, as your main keywords are built into the very foundations of your pages. Theres a reason you often see exact match domain names at the top of the SERPs.

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