Google is recognizing that EMDs (Exact Match Domains) tend to be spammed and are solely for SEO purposes and have flagged them. You can still get away with EMDs (exact match domains) but you have to make sure that there is high relevancy on the website. This means your on-page content should keep the money keyword at or bellows 2% and similar LSI keywords (latent-semantic-indexing) below 10% of overall content to show Google that it is not extremely spammy. The other thing to make sure is that you have a highly relevant backlink profile. This is especially important for EMDs to show Google that your website is highly relevant for the keywords, and are meant to be authoritative in the space. For example, if your EMD is for an affiliate product like lose weight fast, then you need to make sure that your backlinks are not from random domains that have little relevancy to losing weight, but in fact needs to have something health related. Ideally, it would have an exact match or partial match in the domain (rare and hard to find but passes the highest relevancy) or in the inner-page (ie: example.com/health-tips-101).
No-follow still adds relevancy to your backlink profile. Just because no-follow links do not pass any link juice does not mean you should stop blog commenting, forum posting, and guest blogging. It is absolutely valuable in creating relevancy to all of your website. One trick you can do is to type something like “subject” + “leave a comment” on google, to find relevant blog posts that allow people to leave a comment. Find the ones that already have comments which means comments are being approved, and add some value/insight to the comment and link back to your website. Relevancy will come through.
If you purchase PBNs, be more and more wary about purchasing expired domains as opposed to auction domains. Although expired domains are much cheaper than auction domains, Expired domains lose their age when it is re-registered under your name. This means that if you purchase a lot of expired domains and point them all towards your money site, this could potentially leave a huge footprint for Google to attack in a future algorithm update. For example, Google could take the average age of the domains that link to your website. If the majority of the website has most of their links coming from websites that are between 1-2 years old, that could be a huge red flag that Google could penalize. Ideally, you want to mix in both expired and auction domains.
Know that Google’s search algorithm is still, at the end of the day, just a computer. It cannot think, cannot add 1 and 1 together unless it has been programmed to, and cannot find relevancy in articles unless it is obviously related (ie: e-cigs and vape juice). At the end of the day, you want to make it as easy as possible for google’s spiders to crawl your website and know exactly what the website pertains to. Not only does this mean your on-page website needs to be relevant to your niche, but your backlink profile has to show google’s spiders and can understand the relevancy of the backlinks. If you are building out a lose weight fast website, your backlinks have to be coming from websites that are involved in weight loss, exercise, healthy eating, diets, etc. Long gone are the days you can spam blog posts and tag your website in hopes of building out authority to your website. After all, as a side note, it is more important, I dare say, to have relevant links even if it has lower DA/PA.
Do your due diligence. Guys or gals, at the end of the day, the information you need to rank at the top of the page is always available. Just analyze the websites that are at the top of the page and see what’s working out for them. Recently, I noticed a website that had less backlinks and had less domain and page authority rank higher than other websites. I used ahrefs to look at is backlink profile (majestic doesn’t cut it) and noticed that they had extremely relevant backlinks compared to their competitors. This is how I came to my recent findings. Do the same for your niche. Figure out which keyword you’re trying to go after and take a look at the top websites and see what’s working for them and mimic them. This doesn’t mean just look at the #1 site, but look at #3, #4, #5 etc. to get a general scope of what is working and you’ll soon be on your way to SEO success.
Brought to you by Jack Kim.
