Google Slap Coming to Local Keyword Domains?

We (and seomoz) can only speculate what Google may or may not 'slap' in the future.

Personally i don't think exact match domains are going to lose their effectiveness if the content withn the site is relevant to the keywords.

Riz

When Google finally is able to automate the judgment for 'site CONTENT QUALITY and relevance', or perhaps hires 50,000 more employees, then it can begin implementing the slap. Or, perhaps when google gives in to sourgrapers who assume that all exact match sites are crap, spammy, useless.

No way, it is the other way around - they are trying their best to help local keywords. I have heard of evidences in which people search for general words and get locally relevant results - yet to personally see them but this is something I heard for the first time yesterday from a business associate.

No one never knows what google is going to do. Last year alot of people lost millions of dollars running ppc campaigns. Accounts were completely wiped out no warning, no explanation, no nothing. If you using google search engine prepare to get google slapped. I 'm going to give some a tip google loves on/off page seo.

From my experience it is not just the domain name but the content that is important so a local domain with good targeted content will never be affected.

Every time they reindex our clients just do better because we add ongoing content to their sites.

Its not a slap but a reindex and if the site has not added any content they drop and the ones that are adding content rise.

Remember Google and other search engines are interested in providing the most up to date content for their clients so if you provide this content they reward you.

bring on the so called slap as I profit every time.

Quentin

Quentin is right! Good content that is FRESH will always win. You could put great content on a free blog and it would outrank garbage.

Just so you know how serious Google is with local search. Take a look a this. Here in Chicago, IL Google has a local office and they're hiring!

They have 15 job openings for "Account Executive" (sales reps) each targeting a vertical market such as mobile, retail, travel (notice they are top level niches and not sub niches)

Chicago Advertising Sales & Customer Support - US jobs - Google

Google is sending their army of reps out in the field to compete in this "offline" business model. For all of you doubters out there this is a real business opportunity. Build high quality content driven local niche sites and you'll even beat out Google sales reps as they're pushing AdWords accounts among other things.

FREE traffic is an easy sell. :-)

Dennis

Most of you bring up a very good point about the content, which I know is a huge factor. Content will and should always be king when it comes to SEO, but what I wonder is, how much will they drop the keyword rich domains since they seem to be giving them so much power right now.

If and when they implement the "slap" to take back some of the power that keyword specific domains have, how much will they drop and will it be to the point where it will be better to just use the clients business name as the domain and not go after the keyword rich domains?

A lot of businesses have their name domain right now, but offliners are having them use a local keyword rich domain instead for ranking purposes. Will this end up backfiring in another six months? I would hope not, and I would think google wouldn't go that far with it, but what if they did? It may be a case where you want to have multiple domains registered for your client just in case.

Chad,

I believe Google will NEVER drop keyword rich domains and here's why. The average/newbie web user is migrating from the phone book yellow pages to Google. They're "used to" seeing the "Title" in the phone book. These "Titles" on the web would be these keyword rich domains.

I guess anything is possible but why would Google just simply not rank a site with good, quality content because of the domain the content sits on (unless, of course, the domain itself was previously sandboxed or banned).

The other reason is there's so little content with a local flavor that Google begs to see it. This is why there's an abundance of local keywords that are easy to rank for.

If it was up to me, I'd work on these directory type sites that are always highly ranked. In my opinion, this is borderline spam as most of these sites provide just a name and phone number with an occasional review and NO content.

If anything, you may see these local directories (basically scraped content) get a bit slapped by Google.

One thing that will never change is the value of quality content.

Dennis

It will be hard for Google to slap a local keyword targeted domain for having flimsy content, because for a local site flimsy content may be what is required i.e a telephone number and address of a local service. By displaying this information the site will be offering value.

Larry,

Maybe you think a text dump (directory listing) is adequate but I doubt others feel that way. My 63 yo Mother-in-law disagrees. She tells me when searching for something in the yellow pages she will only call the big (expensive) display ads, NOT the text ads.

If the phone was ringing off the hook from Google directory listings then the yellow pages would be gone already. People don't have time to wade through listings for the most part.

Maybe this is not true for others but I thought it was worth asking the in-law as she's probably the typical person hanging to her phone book.

Dennis

I don't think it will affect site with good relevant content.

Larry, you bring up a very interesting idea regarding "content" and "relevancy". I understand where you are coming from, but the problem I see is that the Google spiders establish relevancy based on content, so you kind of have a "which comes first? the chicken or the egg" thing going on.

Searchers may not WANT that content, but in order to establish a sites relevancy, the googlebot NEEDS that content, how else could the site appear so highly in the results? Sure HIGH PR Backlinks CRUSH onpage SEO (in terms of sheer POWER), but you will have limited success using ONLY backlinks in an attempt to "force" relevancy to a page. I believe that Google is perhaps trying other avenues and putting more emphasis on the "locality" of searches, so this is another way of establishing relevancy to a searcher (however you still need that targeted content to really get anywhere in any competitive industry--offline or online)...

- Jim

note: A page is a page to Google, so they aren't going to be doing any "exact-match" snipering anytime soon. They want the whole picture, if you give that to them, the exact-match is just a bonus in your favor I suppose...