Why Exact Match Domain Names are good or bad for SEO?

[Abhijit]

Hi Yasmine,

Exact match domain names held importance in SEO few years back. It was always considered useful to have keywords in your domain names to gain advantage in ranking. The reasons were -

1) Backlinks generated using domain names were having keywords in it.
2) Having a keyword in your domain name implied that you belong to the particular field of specialization thus gained higher ranking for that keyword.

However people started to exploit the technique by creating number of useless domain names and crap websites to fool search engines. This obviously didn’t add any value to end user and such spammy sites degraded overall user experience.

Hence 2011 onwards Google has seen not giving much importance to exact domains. It doest really mean that domains having keywords are useless. They are still quite helpful but don’t carry huge weight that they carried once upon a time.

In 2013, search engines marketing is more abut brand building and building one-to-one relationship with your audiences. Hence you need not necessarily have an exact match domain name. You need to create a brand and build a good reputation for it to succeed.

Hope my answer helps. All the best!