Once touted as the holy grail of SEO, ranking an exact match domain could put you on the map to receive instant search rankings and increased traffic for your website.

Often composed of highly competitive and costly keywords, exact match domains could help you get and keep an edge on the competition without much effort in terms of content.

The simple fact of an exact match domain containing keywords was enough to rocket a website to front page search rankings.

Hundreds and thousands of exact-match domain websites popped up overnight, and exact-match domains were strongly commanding search rankings across major search engines.

Deceptive exact match domain ranking sniffed out

But like previous SEO advantages that were deceptively used to rank, Google launched an exact match domain update targeted to lessen the preference of exact match domains compared to non-keyword specific domains.

However, the EMD update, as often referred to nowadays, would not penalize the ranking of an exact match domain if the website met and adhered to sound SEO ranking factors as other websites per Google’s SEO Guidelines and Policy.

Good, bad or ugly: The endless exact match domain arguments?

In recent years, there is much good, bad, and ugly conversation to be had about whether or not exact match domains still rank well in search engines.

There is the camp that says ranking an exact match domain has lost its step and way in search engines.

They consider exact match domains archaic as dinosaurs and ineffective as the US Postal Service.

Others argue and say exact match domains are still the greatest thing since sliced bread when used according to search engine SEO policies.

Regardless of which camp you belong to, I think it’s safe to say that owning an exact match domain still provides value and an advantage over a domain that does not contain keywords.

In today’s post, I’ll attempt to address some exact match domain concerns while giving insight into one of my latest exact-match domain experiences.