Is Domain Name A Google Ranking Factor? via @sejournal, @mirandalmwrites
Remember the early days of the internet?
You could spend all day chatting with your friends on AOL messenger while you played solitaire on Yahoo games. And then your mom picked up the phone to make a call, and you were kicked off the web. Good times.
In those days, if you were doing some shopping, there was a good chance you were doing it on a site with an exact match domain (EMD). For example, if you needed a dog collar, you’d probably end up on a site with an address like www.buydogcollars.com.
In those primitive days of search engine optimization, it was common for companies to put their exact target keyword phrase right in their domain URL.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you feel about EMDs), scammers and bad actors took advantage of this, snatched up many of these domains, and linked them to low-quality sites.