the End of Keywords in Domains?

Good question Panic,

Your question kind of reminds me of all the other arguments surrounding things that are abused in society or that have negative side effects. For example there were a lot of people that died during our quest to explore outer space but we didn’t close down the space program. People die every day in drunk driving accidents yet alcohol is not banned. These may be extreme examples but they highlight an important concept. There are people that use exact match domain names for their intended purpose which is either for a brand or to accurately describe a the overall theme of a website. More importantly, having any domain available to webmasters gives them the freedom to choose what domain name they think is most beneficial for their brand and for their SEO activities.

Further, exact match domains are only one factor in hundreds that search engines use to rank websites. Just eliminating those would not solve the problem of spam. Also, people that are creating spammy sites using EMD’s are using tons of other tactics to rank their domains that would still exist in the absence of EMD’s.

Here is an interesting post from SEOMoz on EMD’s,

Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline? | SEOmoz

Best,

Shawn