Let us understand low-quality EMD. I wrote an article about the exact domain match earlier. Also, I stressed that these do not work anymore. However, few webmasters still advise people to go for EMD’s. Unfortunately, EMD’s are now under strict scrutiny by Google than before. In other words, EMD’s do more harm than good in current SEO times.
Post Google’s Panda & Penguin the low-quality EMD sites were brutally penalized. They were affected so badly that they never recovered. For visitors who did not read my last article about EMD’s, let me give you a quick definition of the exact domain match, and then we will discuss these low-quality websites.
Definition
EMD websites use keywords to form a domain name. For e.g., if you are into the catering business in the city of new york, and if you choose the domain name as “newyorkcatering.com” you would have a substantial amount of traffic coming at you.
However, this is before the Google update in the year 2011 post which everything changed and EMD sites were not able to ripe the benefits of using keywords in the domain name.
Why EMD is harmful?
Webmasters earlier were taking undue advantage of this loophole and that is the reason why Google came hard on these sites. SEO experts were advising people to still take an EMD because most of them were not aware that Google no longer gives special weightage to EMD sites.
Since Google was looking at these sites more cautiously, they were under constant scrutiny. So, EMD’s are not beneficial now. Earlier they were. I recommend creating a domain with a brand name instead of keywords. Post which you need to work on it to make it rank better. For e.g. my blog Shutterholictv or for that matter shoutmeloud blog.
What should be done?
Try not to get into the abyss of low-quality EMD sites. Instead, think about a brand name that has quality content to rank better and an abundance of good quality backlinks. Webmasters usually choose a particular keyphrase for their domain as they want it to rank better in SERPs.
The idea is to get a keyword that is highly commercial, low competition, high search volume & high AdWords click rate. Then they register this keyphrase as their EMD site. However, this is more like developing a doorway page.
We all know Google hates these doorway pages. These EMD’s do a good job at first, however, when Google realizes that the site is nothing but a doorway page they categorize the website in the bucket of low-quality websites. There you go, now more ranking in search results.
Summing up
Do not ever think about getting an EMD site just for the gains of web traffic. This will do more harm than in the longer run. Most people make these sites or pages to get more traffic which in turn helps them to make a lot of money through Adsense. However, once Google identifies this, your site is gone forever. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below.
