Google Search Quality team’s Matt Cutts early today tweeted that, they had rolled out a newest algorithm update called EMD (exact match domain) update. This latest algo update affects 0.6% of English-US queries and targets domain with exactly matching queries using hyphens etc.
Referring to SEOMoz’s blog post; if the domain name has the keyword exactly matching to top queries will affect by this algo update. For instance; if your site is about teeth whitening and your domain name is www.teethwhitening.com then, your site will affect from this algo update.
SEOMoz also mentions, there are few instances where some sites have dropped their rankings due to this algo update for no reason; as the domain name they have is coincidence. For example , www.charterschools.org appears to be a legitimate site representing a professional organization: the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA).
SEOMoz also had mentioned of top 5 website lost ranking this morning might be the reason of EMD update, those are (previous rankings in bracket)
- www.charterschools.org (#7)
- www.playscrabble.net (#3)
- www.purses.org (#3)
- www.teethwhitening.com (#4)


More about this upadte read here.
















i don’t see any affect on ranking of my clients project and many of them have exact match domain. May be this update is for only low quality exact match domain website
Hi,
Yes I also heard about this recent update from Google. I think the sites having the same keyword in their domain is going to be affected. Apart from that, sites having normal domain name is going to be fine. Thanks for the share!! This post is truly very informative.