The all new EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update

The discovery of the new EMD update has caused much confusion and uproar within the SEO community. What everyone is probably wondering is what exactly this update does.

To know this, you have to first understand that every domain on the web has an exact same match to some search. For example, a site with the URL www.learningbasics.com would be the same match if you were to search ‘learning basics’ on your search engine. As a result, every domain on the web is an EMD. However, many marketers use these exact search matches to gain an added advantage in SERPs. Since 95% of these sites are plain spam, this becomes a problem for search engines.

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To combat this problem, the new EMD update has been introduced. This technique creates an update that is targeted toward signs of abuse. This update is simply an addition to the spam updates previously introduced by Google. For this update to work, Google has to gather information about the site’s anchor text, titles, backlink, on-page factors and line these details up with the domain of the site.

Let’s take another example of a domain: www.numberoneseoservice.com.

Google goes through the anchor text of the site and sees that most of it is reviews about the “number one SEO service”. Next, the on-page factors are looked at. It looks at the density of affiliated links and anchor text of “number one SEO service”. All this is then compared to the domain. That is all there is to this update. Simply look out for signs of spam or ‘over SEO’, compare it to the domain, and if signs of abuse detected, report the domain.

With this update, you need to look more at Google’s intentions rather than what this update exactly does. Yes, there may be still several spam EMD companies ranking in search results. But, with this update, Google is continuously trying to hunt those companies down. Hopefully, in the near future they will be able to completely eliminate the existence of spam EMDs.

By reporting and getting rid of these unwanted sites, Google creates an opening for new and better quality sites to enter and get their place in the internet world. By legitimately creating a site, you are also gaining an efficient way of ranking the site.