Your experience of EMD

As we know emd domains are not that easy to optimize as they were before, however it is still interesting know how they are performing now days.

Anyone tried to seo an emd recently?

 

I'm not seeing a huge amount of difference between EMD/non-EMD on Google. Still work well on BING/Yahoo but obviously a shite marketshare.

 

Although iOS8 will improve that, as Bing gets far more prominent positioning.

 

Could you please elaborate?

 

http://searchengineland.com/spotlight-drops-google-bing-193038
http://readwrite.com/2014/06/03/apple-bing-duckduckgo-search-google-wwdc

 

Bing will follow suit algorithmically eventually. I wouldn't be investing serious money for EMD's anymore that's for sure. If you want some Bing traffic for a temporary SEO play then go ahead.

 

I thought that EMD's were just as easy to rank as non-EMD's? The difference between now and the past being that EMD's historically had a bonus that is now no longer there, resulting in EMD's now being no better or worse to rank than anything else. Or am I missing something?

 

They can add a nice level of credibility, if that's important.

If you have some serious cash for dev, then buy the best - which may well be a decent EMD

 

^ agree with that. If you can afford to LOSE the cash paid out on a decent EMD then definitely use one. Ultimately a much better brand in the end (if it survives the first few years of G updates)

 

EMD's still have a bonus, when you make the EMD your sites "brand" how can it not? The only thing that has changed is that the site needs to be of a certain quality, in the past you could pretty much rank anything on a EMD.

 

^^ this.

EMD's havent lost the ability to be valuable and don't have any less weight than a normal TLD, they've simply been given a more even playing field. Like Matt said above if your brand is that EMD and has the quality along side it its rare that you could go wrong, same for generic keyword domains which describe something that would be hard to describe in any other way, such as forum domains.

If your going for the EMDs in certain spammy markets such as low quality clickbank style landing pages then its likely those could be a target. Take the Payday loan spammy keyword domains for example...look out for alot of upset payday loan marketers in the coming months.

 

Looks like some of the payday loan marketers might be upset sooner rather than later: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2349905/Google-Payday-Loans-Algorithm-Update-Launch-is-Imminent

 

I'm not going to get into another EMD debate, if it's working for you keep doing it although there are several arguments to both of the above points.

Firstly, yes, an EMD can rank just as well as a non-EMD although they are said to come under more scrutiny. Values have dropped on the vast majority of EMD's as what made them valuable in the first place was the ability to simply rank with little effort. If you take that away, it's only the real ultra-premium EMD's that have value and even those are worth nowhere near as much as they were pre April-2012 (Penguin).

The argument of well the keyword is my brand name is invalid. Firstly, Googles billion dollar algorithm is quite capable of detecting what is a keyword and what is a legitimate brand name. Brand signals i.e. mentions of your brand around the web plus people actually searching for your brand on Google are HUGE factors in determining ranking, significantly more than the domain itself. If you have a keyword domain, short of people actually searching for your full domain or your full domain being mentioned, you lose both of these metrics.

I've been building sites on old EMD's and non-EMD's since the aforementioned update in April 2012 and overall it's my non-EMD's that get more traffic. In terms of link building, if you wanted to rank for KEYWORD ONE, you can get away with a lot more links to your non-EMD than matching your keyword links to your keyword brand. Given that the domain bonus is minimal these days and you do still need links to rank, personally, when all things considered (including outright domain costs) I'm opting for the unique brand over EMD.

Regarding the Payday niche, there have been "Payday Loan" updates for the past couple of years. It's nothing new. You don't see EMD's ranking in the payday niche anymore but on any given day there are a number of spam sites in the top 10. The update was a bit of a joke.

 

Its a waste of time now - you might as well all forget it. You're all going to get aids and its not going to be funny.

 

There was a theory that AIDS originated from monkey-human contact.
Was it you?

An EMD still makes a big difference to a quality site, it's really only pump-and-dump spammers who got hit. My EMDs got through Panda, Penguin and the EMD update unscathed.

 

Do you have anything built on a EMD in 2013/2014 fresh that has ranked well above the brands?

Lots of EMD's are still ranking but 95% of them are ones which have been around before Penguin and survived, such as yours. In terms of new builds, I don't see much success which is what this thread is about? Even if there is some success, the negatives outweigh the positives when all things considered on the domain front in terms of brand/pricing/longevity etc

 

Yes, I've got recently developed EMDs outranking brands.
They are better sites though: more content, higher quality, more updates etc.