You have a great business selling shoes in Nowhereville. You search the web and find out ShoesNowhereville.com is available! You can’t believe it, and start shaking with excitement.
But wait… before you lean your online marketing on what seems like a perfect domain name.
Google made a significant update known as the “exact match domain” loophole update in late 2012. What exactly does this mean?
For a while, some websites had it easy. They snatched up a great domain name with the exact keyword phrase people were searching for, and they received significant “Google juice” and visitor activity even if the content on the website was poor.
In this recent update, Google no longer weighed the ranking value on that domain name, so the algorithm looks for quality content instead. For sites without a lot of strong content related to that phrase, search engine placement plummeted. Even some sites with great quality content suffered some shift in rankings.
Whose fault is it that my domain’s rankings dropped?
If you have to blame anyone, don’t blame Google. They are simply trying to give people good content results for their search. So it makes sense they would lean the algorithm even more toward quality content.
Domain brokers ruined it.
You know – those companies who buy and sell domain names, with endless ugly template web pages popping up. They often have a link to “buy” the domain, or just news feeds from various sites with very little content and a giant search box.
Bad SEO marketers ruined it.
By setting up hundreds of “doorway” pages with no content value, they watered down the Internet with poor quality content that was not legitimately helping searchers.
So is your domain valuable at all?
Sure it is. Just consider it as more of a messaging tool and a way for customers to easily relate to your business and remember your website name. Don’t lean your entire online marketing campaign on the domain name. But an easy to spell and very relatable domain name can be a great asset.
