Exact Match Domain question ***yawn i know ***

If the content is of high quality and you don't over optimise on or off site then you should be fine in most circumstances.

There are still plenty of exact match domain names that rank highly in their niche.

The trick is to avoid spammy over optimisation as that's where you will come unstuck.

There are short term SEO and long term SEO. If you want to wait for one year and make money from your website for years to come, create an authority site and implement long term SEO, as being taught in Bring The Fresh or Site Build It. The good news with this method, is your website will get ranking and traffic for years to come. The bad news is, you have to be patient, keep posting content for months before seeing the result. As for short term SEO, the trick is to build mini sites, with exact keyword that you are targeting, such as yourkeyword.com, add two posts or something and build backlinks to it. You will be ranked faster and make money faster, in two weeks or less based on my experiment, but then, your ranking will drop quickly as well. Very suitable for keywords that will expire, such as internet marketing product name keywords. If you want to make profit for both short and long term, why not create both mini site and authority site? This way you will start making money in one month and then continue for years to come.

Why do you think it is penalized? Is it an aged domain from a penalized site? Or are you under the wrong impression that Google penalizes EMDs. They don't, all other things being equal.

Steve

If Google had it in for EMDs Walmart wouldn't rank for their brand name.

They still work, just back off on trying to force the rankings with them.

Don't stuff the keyword in every time you can. The site title, and once in the h1 tag is more than enough. Don't stuff it into your post titles and URLs.

Keep your links dialed back, using generic and naked anchors until you start seeing rankings. Then shoot a few high metric links at it with your main anchor and it will stick.

Google wants to rank brands for their name, not overzealous SEOs.

These people are wrong. I would prefer an exact match domain over anything else. They WILL help your SEO.

Google doesn't penalize exact match domains. It's far more complicated than that. If it's a good name and it's relevant to your niche, then buy it.

In theory, you can put content up with any domain name, but you might as well have one that's relevant. It will help you with visitors, and maybe with the search engines, too.

Of course, you're still free to create a site for dog training and call it GreatRecipesFromHomerIsCool.com, but why would you want to?

You've either been misinformed or misunderstood about Google penalizing exact match domains. Google is doing no such thing. The thing that changed that got a lot of people who were publishing worthless websites up in arms about is that Google no longer rewards worthless EMD websites just because they are EMD.

All those people who were making silo sites with one or two pages of copied, spun, or generally available content that were ranking just because they had a good domain name lost their rankings - deservedly. Exact match domains with unique and valuable content were unaffected.

It doesn't matter either way. I have brand domains with pages ranking #1 and EMDs with pages ranking #1.

Google ranks pages, and of course you want relevant keywords in the url for your pages.

It's already been proven across the board from every expert SEO worth listening to that the key to multiple high rankings for multiple pages is to make sure your entire site has a discoverable (by Google) "niche" or "theme" that you stick close to, regardless of your domain name.

Personally, I think a brand domain name gives you a bit more advantage for ranking for loosely-connected keywords in the long term, if only because of the non-specificity of the primary domain name that always appears in the url of all your pages (in other words, the keywords in a page url always rules when using a brand domain and aren't affected like they are by the keywords in a primary domain name from an EMD).

My Brother swears by them. And it does kind of make sense. If a website is SEOArticles.com (for instance) then more than likely that's what the website would be about. In any case, you can't argue with his results: He's making a small fortune. : )

EMD's used to be a big deal for SEO folks, not sure if it holds any value nowadays though..