A very interesting subject for me. What google search volume for a particular keyword constitutes a category killer? I have recently managed to get my hands on an exact match domain that yields 650000 searches globally on google and about 64000 local to the UK. Is this deemed to be a good search volume for an exact match domain?

Honestly though, I wouldn’t be surprised if your strategy decreased in effectiveness over time. And Google will easily be able to see that the domains are connected (whois data, analytics, links, etc). If possible, the best idea may be to use the traffic you’re getting to promote a branded site while still making money (and investing some of it into the branded site).

I agree entirely with your comments, and this is something we’re looking at building up to. We wanted to see the amount of traffic these domains would bring before deciding what to do with the traffic afterwards.

It’s a bit of a catch 22, becasue the domains are generating substantial commisions on their own, but one flick of the algorithm switch and you’re right, it could be bye-bye forever, and we wouldnt have a main site to fall back on.

The general consensus amongst my partners is that by treating all the domains as separate entities, we’re less likely to ‘enter google’s radar’ and be penalised on a mass scale. Another opinion is that Google will never reduce the weight they give to exact match domains, as google wouldnt be doing it’s job if it didnt return the big brands for searches such as nike, reebok etc.

I have to say i’m slightly more sceptical, as i belive that Google could potentially manually review the superbrands and ensure they are ranking for their terms, and let the other websites fight it out based on quality content, structure and links.

It’s already starting to happen. search for ‘las vegas hotels’ and you will see the majority of the results are the big name hotels. Is Google doing their job? I’d say yes. People want hotels in las vegas and google has provided…..

I agree with some of the previous posts against keyword match domains. I agree it’s unfair that a site that is constantly updated and is content rich should be out-ranked by a site on the basis that the domain matches the search term.

For the sake of our business let’s just hope this doesn’t happen but i’m with you on the need to develop some sort of brand site of our own to at least fall back on.

Appreciate your thoughts.

My focus with Internet marketing and SEO always revolves around the end user. In other words, if I’m faced with the dilemma of employing a certain strategy, I ask myself “would I do this for my visitors, even if Google didn’t exist?” If the answer is no, I usually scrap it.

By providing value, rather than relying on tricks, you’re essentially future proofing your SEO.

In your case, your business relies heavily on the exact match bonus from Google. What happens if Google made a slight tweak to its algorithm to discount this? I don’t think it’s necessarily spam, but I think the strategy is shaky – whether Google flags it or not. Plus it’s a $100,000+ yearly expense.

My suggestion to you would be to leverage those 12,000 domains to drive traffic to a branded site (i.e. something like hotels.com). That way, you’re reaping the benefits of your technical advantage to build a long term business and site.

Let me know what you think. Would love to discuss further with you.

My recommendation to you would be to continue building links, preferably with “walkie talkies” as the link anchor text. Google loves links and with enough you can take down bigger brands and the exact match domain.

If you can, it’d be nice to buy up the walkietalkies.com domain too.

Gyutae, I totally agree with your post – we currently have around 12,000 live domains targetting the travel sector. All our domain names contain exact match, long-ish tail search terms, and although they don’t bring in a huge amount of traffic in their own right, the critical mass of monthly unique visitors is in the millions.

I also agree that these sites do drop away after Google’s initial push, and a certain amount of linkbuilding is required (although a lot less than a non-keyword domain) to keep it near the top of the tree.

I do have a slightly off-topic question here though, and this is something i’ve been pondering for a while. Whilst we are offering users a service that is relevent to their search query (ie a certain star rated hotel in a certain city), i’ve often wonderered whether the scale we’re doing it on maybe considered spam. For example, any user could probably find what they’re looking for, in any city, by just going on a site like hotels.com and searching from within.

I still don’t see how Google can penalise smaller, 2 or 3 page sites with an exact match domain, if they are providing a service to the users of the web (and perhaps even more relevent results than a huge site like hotels.com that will require further navigation)

This is where it gets tricky. We’d like to look at our stats in greater detail using some form of web analytics. I’d like your advice as to whether you think creating a google account with 12,000 domains, each with the same tracking script (to monitor combind traffic), would be a red flag to google, and even if it was flagged, is there anything they could do about it anyway, given that we are giving the users exactly what they are searching for?

Thanks,

Rich

We own a site “walkie-talkies.com” that ranks first on yahoo [sometimes the wikipedia article on walkie talkies might rank higher] and ranks highly on bing. But is buried somewhere in the bottom of googles’ Serps pages.
We sell walkie talkies, all content is walkie talkie related and frequently updated.

Google et al place a lot of weight on the ccTLD as well for ‘local’ searches. In Australia 80% of the top ten searches are invariably .au domains.

So put that together with the exact match discussion above and you can do extremely well.

A good example is debitcard.com.au, a site we developed. Good content but very light on IBLs and it still pops up No1 in G for the term “debit card” in Australia.