Why I think brandable domains will continue to outperform exact match domains...

Did you also notice that they have a lot of backlinks and they are really unique ?

And i don't know what taobao or qq is and probably wouldn't have known about baidu if i wasn't into seo. You should replace those 3 with ebay, steam and microsoft.

I haven't read the article but what a shitty list to give as a reason for your theory. You are going to list the most famous websites in the world known for their uniqueness in what they offer, like seriously ?.

I would have given more weight into the article if there was some research done instead of just listing top 10 sites in the world for your theory. Here's my theory and i have the top 10 sites in the world as a proof

Subject: Death of black themed websites

Google has updated its site color algorithm and now ignoring sites with black themes as google is getting smarter and increasingly interested in sites easy on eyes of its visitors. The overall whiteness of the site is what is most important. Google sees that the sites that get the most repeated visitors tend to be ones that are white in color. Here are the top 10 most popular websites in the world:

Google.com
Facebook.com
YouTube.com
Yahoo.com
Baidu.com
Wikipedia.com
Twitter.com
Qq.com
Taobao.com
Amazon.com

Notice the pattern? None of them are black and all are white. Google wants to show searchers sites that are easy on eyes. More and more we will see this ranking preference for sites.


PS: I also can not believe you listed Google in f***ing list of sites that google favors. What is wrong with you.

Google definitely likes brands. Exact-match domains are usually lower quality in general, too. I think that's part of it. People who go with a brand domain name are more likely to produce high-quality content because they aren't focused on churn-and-burn. They are looking to build long-term traffic.

They also tend to have social media accounts in the site's name and tend to drive traffic to their site from those accounts.

Exact match domains are just created to rank in general with low quality content. So this is the main reason why Google do not like EMD.

Those websites mentioned above are websites of real businesses, not small niche or affiliate sites, so there is a big distinction, which renders the theory above inconclusive. Even if facebook had an exact match domain targetting a popular keyword, they would still be as successful as they are right now. The same goes for all the other sites in the list.

Brandable domains are the way forward, that is indisputable. But the OP was substantiated with the wrong examples. Proper examples should be niche sites built on brandable domains ranking well, e.g. apennyshaved.com (Spencer Haws and Perrin's case study website).

What do you think about half brand - half EMD then? That's how I procedure in general

Another thing about branded domains is you can be super aggressive with link building and not get penalized on an individual keyword basis. So you build tons of branded links for juice and use your onpage SEO to rank.

Maybe you did not notice those sites were there BEFORE the update as well.
(Your list is a bit off, but no matter)

Anyone who swallowed any EMD crap swallowed just that. Crap.

It was not an EMD update, but a crap update. Nothing to do with EMD in its
raw form.

Paul