Read Part One

In part one I talked a bit about the history of Google slaps and Exact match domains.

We all use them, they are getting harder and harder to find with good reason, They Work!

If you can get the exact domain name for the keyword you are after then add in some good on page seo you should need to do a reduced amount of work to get to where you want.

My question is how long will the advice “buy a exact match domain and install wordpress” be the only advice that anyone seems to give newbies.

Here is a comment that was made on my first post  by R W veal

I have a key worded domain .info site that ranks consistently on the first page of google for the keyword, most times more than once on the first page. However there is a .net site with the same keyword with nothing past the initial old wordpress template nothing else on the site and it is always on first page as well,

That pretty much sums up why I think a real Google slap will happen in the next 6 months to a year. When they stop messing around with Google Instant and start looking at how relevant the top 10 results are for searches they will see LOADS of domains ranking in the top 10 with nothing more than the default wordpress install.

This adds nothing of value for the searcher. But it also knocks a site that may have relevant content out of the money spots.  We have all built sites which are full of useful relevant content that we can’t get to rank high enough because someone has a junk site with a exact match domain and Google seem to love it.

I don’t think the question is really IF Google will Slap Exact Match Domains, it is WHEN will they do it and the question after than is What can we do about it?

I AM NOT saying stop looking for exact match domains

I AM NOT saying dump the ones you have

What I am saying is think about what you can do to add value to the search results, don’t buy a domain name if you know you won’t ever develop it, and be prepared to do some work. The only thing that makes you money is rankings.

Top 10 is nice, but won’t make money, you NEED top 3 to even sniff at the real income potential of your site. Having the exact match domain will NOT be enough you will have to get ready for some link building.

What I do

After buying a domain I will install wordpress (no big news there) and I will write a 500+ word post using my LSI Content creator software so it features not only the main word but some related ones.

Run the site through the process I explained previously in Getting Sites Indexed

Manual Bookmarking – Jumptags and Mister Wong

This will be enough to get the site indexed, then I leave it alone for a week or two.

After a week at least I will use Market Samurai to check where it ranks for every possible keyword I can find. All too often I have already started getting emails from my Rank Tracker Plugin telling me it is already getting some rankings but I like to check anyway.

Once I know what Google think I know what to do to move on up the ranks. Not doing any link building is NOT AN OPTION if you want to avoid the wrath of Google.

Rather than making this long post even longer, I will ask you to sign up for the rss feed, or bookmark the site as I will be publishing some posts this next week on what  I am doing to insulate my sites.

What I am doing to build links NOW..rather than reading stuff from a year or two ago let me share what I am using now..

Please do leave me a comment sharing your thoughts and ideas, I am off for a lie down as I think this is my longest post ever!

If you have been hanging around The WordPress Goldmine forum for any amount of time you will have heard my mate Mark Thompson banging on about buying exact match domain names for, well near enough 2 years I bet.

Someone recently released a product (with much hoopla and a $97 price tag I believe) which was sold as the next big Google killing secret and it was basically ..buy a exact match domain name and use WordPress..there saved you $97!

What Are Exact Match Domain Names?
They are domain names, can be any of the TLD’s although everyone prefers .com/.org/.net, where the domain is the exact keyword you are looking for. So if you want to sell silver toasters you would buy silvertoasters.com/org/net

Not only can you get type in traffic (from the .com mainly) but having the exact keyword you are going after in the domain name is considered a huge boost in SEO terms.

So a site which has the exact match domain can go top 10 with nothing other than a simple wordpress install and it isn’t rare to see sites go top 3 with nothing more than the right domain name and a good post.

Like shooting fish in a barrel right?

Well, you still need to choose a niche that

• Has money in it
• Has no strong competition in the top 10
• Has a TLD available

The 3rd part of the equation is the hardest bit these days.

Once you have the domain then install wordpress and write a nice long post with lots of related keywords and then let it sit and see what it does.

This works, sure if you buy 10 then some will require no work, some will require a fair bit of work and some won’t make the money you hoped they would no matter what you do.

But that is now, what about the future..

Let me explain this blog post a  bit more..

Twice a year there is an event held in Leeds called Think Visibility , It aimed at SEO’s and I have never been (not only am I not a seo geek but I don’t live in the UK anymore) . I have however followed along with the twitter stream for the last couple of events and then read the blog posts about it.

Many times it is all so far over my head that I just blink and get back to doing my thing but one thing in this years twitter stream (which was patchy in comparison to the last time) was something from a presenter (and I cant find the reference to give them a link, sorry but I am writing this a week later as it has been on my mind) saying that exact match domains were due for change.

I don’t think they were actually saying that anyone with an exact match domain was going to get Google slapped, but is it beyond the realms of logic?

Let look at this from a history point of view, and we all know history repeats itself, anyone remember the days when you could do a bit of keyword stuffing on the page and rank? You know just throw the same keyword in the page and make it the same color as the background so no people see it but the search engines did. I actually heard a great story about this technique just recently which I will share another time.

What about Blog and Ping? They were heady days, buy 50 .info domains for 99c each before breakfast and use automated software to build them out by lunch. Quick snack of pizza and coke or red bull and then spend the afternoon running software to make a couple of hundred blogger blogs to promote the new sites.

These are just two things I can think of that worked like gangbusters at one time and now don’t..

So are Exact match domains going to be next?

My thoughts in the next blog post, I would love to hear any thoughts you have on the matter. I am off to Costco now apparently!

About Paul Forcey