Google announced another change to the algorithm last week that could not only affect your ranking but also the value of domain names as well!

Matt Cutts Warned Us About The EMD Update Over A Year

Ago:----

He points to a Webmaster Help video from Google’s Matt Cutts from early 2011, where he hinted that Google would be “turning down” exact match domains as a ranking signal. Here’s what he said exactly:

“We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it.”

Matt went on to say that the change “affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree,” but didn’t pin down the timeline. We measured a 24-hour drop in EMD influence from 3.58% to 3.21%. This represents a day-over-day change of 10.3%. While the graph only shows the 30-day view, this also marks the lowest measurement of EMD influence on record since we started collecting data in early April.

Matt Cutts announced a “small,” upcoming algorithm change meant to reduce the amount of low quality exact match domains in search results. Exact match domains contain keywords that exactly match the search query.

Cutts also tweeted, “New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.”