Google Says An Existing Site Won’t Drop In Rankings Just Because It Uses An Exact Match Domain

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that an existing site would not drop in ranking just because it uses an exact match domain. “Changes like that would be due to other reasons,” he added.

In response to John personally not being a fan of these exact match, keyword-rich hyphenated domains, an SEO complained one of his sites dropped. He wrote:

I own www.cbd-uk.com which after the latest rollouts, went from #1 for “cbd uk” to #100+?

This has killed my traffic and sales, and if this continues, will it kill my business too? Surely google isn’t penalizing me because my domain is EMD? This company was started after my father got cancer, which helped him. If this is the case, I need to start again.

John replied, “An existing site isn’t going to drop in ranking just because it uses an EMD. Changes like that would be due to other reasons.”

The conversation goes on, if you want to read it on Mastodon.

Yea, Google has a legacy exact match domain algorithm update but I wonder how much, if any, it is used these days.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.