google has done a good job of confusing us and reducing the quality of their search results. If it is a micro niche website you can go EMD, but the general consensus is that they don't have as much ranking power as they did before. If it's a larger website then branding is more important than the EMD.

Derprinz,

The fact that website owners were using EMD’s was not the target of the recent update that wiped many of them off the SERP’s but rather those owners were doing a variety of other things that got them demoted and they happened to be using EMD’s as a part of their strategy. Google (or any other search engine for that matter) really doesn’t care what URL you use as long as you have quality content and you don’t appear to be deceptive in your practices.

Happyeagle has a good point that you should carefully consider branding vs going with a ranking factor. Using an EMD is a small portion of the overall effort to rank your site so if branding is important, go that route.

This post talks more about the subject,

Local Exact Match Domains Still Rank - Google Algo Update

As does this one from SEOMoz,

Google's EMD Algo Update - Early Data | SEOmoz

Hope that helps,

Shawn

The EMD Update introduced a new filter. A Filter is a routine that is periodically run over the corpus of data Google has. This means it's not running continuously as new data is evaluated and as rankings are computed.

This is why it may seem like right now new EMDs still rank just fine.

However, when Google reruns the EMD filter then your new EMD will get snared by the filter if it satisfies certain criteria. Not all EMDs got zapped, as several people have already pointed out, and the filter is an automatic (non-human-mediated) process, so it's probably possible to recover from the de-ranking if the EMD domain didn't get any severe penalty when the filter was last run.

So: EMDs still work, and the criteria are both off-site and on-site, so fixing just the on-site problem when there's also off-site problems will probably not get the site back where it was before the EMD Update.

After EMD you must remember that there are less chances for you to get ranked in google by using keywords in domain.

If you are buying the domain with the same purpose then dont, but if you are looking from your user perspective like its easy for them to recall and all, then there is no harm in going for exact match domains

EMD is only to penalize low quality emd websites.

Forget about EMD, focus on building user friendly website with informative content. Then build quality links and do social media promotion to increase your website reach.

Actually NOT all of the EMD sites are affected! Their bases to outrank the EMD websites is the quality of contents and backlinks on it! You can register and EMD domain BUT make sure that all of them quality websites. I assume that you already know what i mean of QUALITY websites.

Check this experiments from my friend: Why other EMD sites were not affected by the recent update | edpudol.com: Building Real Online Business

Regards,

Ronnie

As mentioned by Ronnie , good content is one important factor. If you want to build a micro niche site it is best not to depend on emd as your ranking factor , specially after the Google emd update.

On the other hand if your goal is to build a high quality authority website emd is not a factor at all as you will receive traffic from dozens and dozens of of keywords.

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When Matt Cutts described the 'EMD update' he basically said Google was 'removing the boost' the EMD had. So now you have to decide if you really want a crappy, keyword-stuffed domain name if it doesn't add the benefit of a boost for ranking.

It's true that this update had removed some quality sites also. So if you want to publish third party any ads on your blog then never go with EMD.

I would say never care those different updates by Google.Just put your efforts on the basics.Just keep generating great content that Google always love.Put more efforts in social media marketing rather than search engine optimization.

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Nevermind the EMD, ditch the whole "micro-niche" concept.

as long as your content is ok, then you shouldnt worry

id prefer not to make it a micro niche site though

Even though Google says that they only removed the boost a site got from incorporating the keyword in their domain but it ain't so. Most EMD site that got hit lost their ranking in just that keyword that was incorporated in their name but they retained their rankings in all other keywords. If it was only targeting EMDs with crappy contents that ALL of the site would have been hit.