Matt Cutts Explains the Importance (or lack thereof) of Keywords in Your Domain Name

Exact match (keyword) domains will ALWAYS help you rank for the target keyword, even if Google decides to lessen the weight they're given.

I've been using them for years, and probably always will.

Only thing that I have to say is: "I AGREE!"

Let's look at this from a different angle

For me personally, If I was looking up 'train your dog' and looked that phrase up in google I would rather click on the website named trainyourdog.com or something similar rather than a website with a completely irrelevant name.

Although I know we're talking about ranking the pages - that would just involve effort on your part but I always looks at a website name to see if it's relevant before I click-through.

Soooo.... essentially nothing is changing. Just is "THINKING" about toning it down in the algorithm. LOL.

I personally beleive the EMD has more to do with branding and user expectation than simply having a keyword in the domain.

A domain name is often seen as a trademark. If you own that trademark then there is a good chance that your site will be a specialist in that trademark.

Users search (and type into the address bar) trademarks all the time to get to that trademark site. They aren't looking for the subject but the company's site.

The SEO types take advantage of this and go and grab long tail trademarks which simply exploits the way Google works based on typical user behaviour.

Now, a trademark domain can always be beaten. You just have to have a more relevant and more trusted domain (backlinks etc).

Paul gave some examples of Amazon and plentyoffish etc. These domains don't refer to a keyword but I bet when someone is after Amazon and they Google 'Amazon', Google will provide the Amazon domain. Same with the other examples.

Now, a dedicated SEO could technically beat these domains out for their own domain names but it would require more backlinks and better content. It would be tough.

The same reasoning that a search for Amazon returns amazon.com is the same reason that a search for Big Red Widgets returns bigredwidgets.com.

So yeah, that was a bit of a ramble. I just believe that EMD do work but most people doing it aren't doing it well enough to not be overtaken by a more experienced SEO marketer.

Both branded domain names and keyword domain names have their good points. Content will still play the key part in getting noticed and found when searching. A branded name is something someone will be more apt to remember.

In short, I can't see where anything has changed as far as branded names or keyword names.



Cindy

My take is to stop panicking about the keywords in the domain and just get on with building a good site stuffed full of relevance.

I Agree with this, the most important is you have the right title and content in your site. People don't care about the domain name in searching, but the title itself is the main focus of it.

Ignore keyword domains, I've never had a problem by not using them!
without sounding like Matt Cutts, concentrate on providing the best content and experience that you can for your website visitors and ranking will come.

the thing Matt says at the end is worrying .

So they are going to look at reducing the power of the domain name for ranking..

thanks for the share dude, I also think page tittle and description is much more improtant

Google has been telling people 'no single factor is very important'. They did so with PR, they started showing 'non-title' snippets in titles and now it's the domain names.