Ch. 3: The Domain That Didn't Matter

Ch. 3: The Domain That Didn't Matter

Old-school advice said an exact-match domain was rocket fuel. So I overpaid — $1,800 — for BestRobotVacuums.net, convinced the keyword in the URL would carry me.

It did nothing. Eighteen months in, that site sat at 6k sessions, $70/mo. Meanwhile a side project on a totally brandable made-up name, 'Tidbin', hit 22k sessions and $310/mo in the same window with the same content effort.

When I finally looked closely, the EMD was a liability: it screamed 'thin affiliate site' to anyone who landed, so my email signups were half Tidbin's rate. The keyword in the domain bought me a worse brand and zero ranking edge.

— Google killed EMD juice with an update back in 2012
— A brand name compounds; a keyword string doesn't

Lesson banked: Buy a name you could put on a coffee mug, not one you could put in a meta tag.