We all know someone who’s reckoned they’re on the brink of online ‘millionairedom’ because they’ve registered what Google refers to as an exact match domain – www.redkitchenpedalbins.com, www.buyplasticspatulas.co.uk etc. 
“All I need to do is chuck up a quickie website and I’ll have John Lewis and Brabantia beating my door down – loadsamoney!”
Well maybe not anymore.
Matt Cutts, google spam-sniper extraordinaire, has recently announced on social media that Google is planning a “small” algorithm change to “reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains” ranking highly in the search results. He estimates that it will have a clear impact on impact 0.6% of English-US queries but went on to explain that it’s not connected to the recent *Panda/**Penguin updates.
Matt Cutts was reported as saying a year or two ago that Google would be investigating why exact domain matches perform so well purely on the strength of their domain, particularly when the actual site is poor.
Over the next few weeks we’ll see this in action finally and witness some ‘corrections’ in the search results. Many sites that rank highly for keywords that match their domain may take a hit in Google’s results.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that all sites with domains that exactly match keywords they target are going to get walloped. It just means that, yet again, Google are further promoting sites that put effort into high quality seo content and penalising low quality sites with poor or minimal content.
How does your site measure up? Get a free seo audit for your website.
*Panda is Google’s algorithm filter for targeting and penalising poor quality content.
**Penguin is a google algorithm filter that fights web spam.