Do EMD’s Still Work?

A hot topic in the past year has been whether or not EMD’s still work and if you should bother with them. The answer is highly debated yet I’ve never seen someone bring up actual search results to give examples. There are a few different reasons why you’d want an EMD, but if you’re planning on building a real brand then don’t put all your eggs in this basket.

The big reason they’re so sought after are due to the affiliate marketing perks and the ability to spam the living shit out of that anchor text/keyword. You truly are allowed to get away with quite a bit of junk link building when you’re rocking an EMD. I wouldn’t bet on this as a solid long term strategy, but there is definitely some easy money to be made with the right domain.

I was meeting with a new hotel client today based out of Thailand and was quite shocked at the results for “Thailand Hotels”;

 
This is a very competitive market and I’d expect that most emd’s in the .com/net/org varieties is going to rank quite easily. A quick look at the backlink profile shows that the first ranking site is there will very little effort. His own network of other Thailand travel blogs was enough to land this site a no1 ranking spot on Google. The site is also pretty much entirely made up with duplicate content so you’d think ranking for a keyword like that wouldn’t be so easy?

So let’s take a look at a few more queries to get an idea of what’s going on in a rang of niches.

You can search all day and see strong signs up EMD’s working just great. If you look at the ones ranking in tough verticals you’ll notice they’re not thin. If you build up a solid website with great content around an EMD then it looks like you’re in for some #winning for a long time to come. As always, I’ll ask for you folks to chime in and let me know what you’re feeling and seeing around in the search results these days.