THE WORLD OF SEO

November 24th, 2010 by Simon

Recently a lot of discussion has been going on over the issue of exact match domains being overpowering in SERPs. Any search query users do these days will bring a list of a few good relevant sites, and a lot of sites with and an exact matches/keywords in domain sites.

A call to Google has been made that they should not have so much authority in the results pages. This is due to people buying domains simply for the quick rank, rather than putting the effort into building a brand image and associated keywords.

Recently at Pubcon, Matt Cutts came out to say that Google will be looking at exact match domains and why they rank so well. However, punishing people for exact match domains seems counter intuitive to Google’s stand point that the root of SEO is usability and to be user-friendly.

Recently I’ve been looking at the impact of the title tag and meta description in terms of how it can impact the Click Through Rates (CTR).  – I have found that the domain name also had a great impact.

The impact of such things is hard to contextualise but I will give an example of how my data panned out:

An exact match domain + title tag resulted in a CTR of 38%

A non exact match domain with a relevant domain + title tag had a CTR of 18%

A non exact match domain with a relevant domain – title tag had a CTR of 1%

The above seems dramatically low, but looking at the PPC ads and the organic results below them, they all have the keyword first. This results in the user making that judgement to click those links that appear more relevant.

We will be following this blog up with further research on titles and their direct correlation to Click Through Rates. But for now it is just great to be reminded that SEO is so much more than your position in Google.

So what google needs to do is focus on those domains but make sure they aren’t add filled spam sites. Using this data is clear to see that in terms of being user friendly, exact match is key. But if you don’t have an exact match then focusing on getting how you look in the SERPs is just as important as your position/domain.

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