Is .com better than .info? Is EMD better than partial match/stop words? Here are MY findings.

Yeah, basically I am pretty sure exact match domains are STILL the easiest way to rank on page one for a low-competition niche keyword phrase, even though it is no longer a guarantee you will shoot up there within two days like used to be the case. You won't necessarily stay there either.

So Xfactor/Clickbump is dead, partly, but in an adapted form still works great.

Hey great post ...

Ive come to similar conclusions as of late after getting deep in my wallet for domain buying sprees and trying to rank them.

I dont mind the backlink bit - so ... i can go with a few filler words ... or letters.

.nets and .coms from now on and Im kicking the " - " approach to the curb as well.

i think id prefer the filler words in the emd as longs as the kw phrase makes up greater than 90% of the letters in the dom. Will over come the shortcomings of filler words with more linking.

but what I find is the .biz / .info enter the index in the high 100's 187, 177

the .nets and the .coms - 100 - 77 - 87 - 75 range ...

I can and have ranked them all - but the .biz and .info seem to be requiring far more backlinking resources and content [ and time ] to both maintain serps and rise ...

Hate static html - so im sticking with WP

Thanks for your long writeup, markowe. EMD's are definitely still owning, no matter if it's a longtail or a competitive one-word keyword.

Sure, I made it clear from the start these are just my results. They are all completely different niches and different keywords so that hardly helps the comparison. However they are almost all up against the same sort of competition on page one
- low PR, poorly optimised pages, so you would kind of expect them to perform similarly. I am sure there is still much more going on in this ranking business than we realise.

One similarity between the really low performers (the effectively 'sandboxed' ones) is that the INDIVIDUAL words that make up the kwp, e.g. ONLINE DIAMOND CAMERA (erm, made-up example!) are each high-competition words in their own right. I wonder if that has any bearing, you don't hear that talked about a lot, but it's not the first time I have wondered that.

Chris, good questions, I didn't really get into that in my OP. I will try to update the OP soon giving info about my backlinking, but like I said, I really hate backlinking, so for most sites it's been little more than a few articles, a Squidoo lens, a Hubpage, a few blog comments maybe and that's about IT! A lot of people are going to say, "Well, there's your problem!" and I agree, that's why many of my sites bomb, but as I say, I want the EASY results, right?

And guess which site I did the LEAST backlinking for (just one article on EZA, reposted verbatim to 6 or 7 others, maybe a forum sig or two just to get indexed and I think a dozen social bookmarks via OnlyWire)?

You guess it, the .net EMD that is earning me $5 a day.

So you can see why I have come to the conclusion I have, at least based on MY results, as to where to focus my efforts.

Oh, and about content, most of the sites I have pretty much not touched since putting up the first 3 or 4 articles. Some I have thrown in a couple of extra related pages, some of them I have expanded the original 1-page article into 3 or 4 related ones. This new content DOES seem to have helped in one way or another (consolidating no. 1 position in the case of Site 1, getting some new long-tail traffic on site 4). But the .net, the best performer, I have just added a couple of related articles which to be honest get no traffic for the most part and I wonder whether they made any difference at all...

Again, I will let people draw their own conclusions, but for me, I know where I will be focusing most of my efforts.

Oh, P.S. About domain age - they are all new domains to the best of my knowledge. However there is one site, that I didn't mention here, that is an EMD.com and, it turns out, WAS registered previously, even though I didn't know that at the time. That site spent a little while on page one having gone in very quickly, but has now slipped to page two or three. I am looking at why that happened - my feeling is that my articles are a little short, like 150-200 words. The product in question isn't really out yet and does not get many searches (and I don't have much to write about!), so I will build that one out more when the time comes. Still, that does show that domain age / EMD / good TLD need not NECESSARILY yield results, but I can point to other factors with that site that could be causing problems, especially the content.

...and..? More detailed comments, evidence, concrete experience? Or is it just personal taste?

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