randle - 8:03 pm on Oct 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

An "EMD" doesn't make a site good or bad, low quality or high; its just a bunch of characters. To be honest, it was a little surprising to see Google, via Matt Cutts, put the two terms, "low quality" and "exact match domains" in the same sentence.

One has nothing to do with the other. Do "EMD's" have a higher percentage of "low quality" (googles term not mine by any stretch) sites than non "EMD'S"? Absolutely, but whatever letters were configured to make the domain name dont have anything to do with whats in the site, or the user experience.

The actual identifying of the "EMD" has got to be a very small part of whatever formula the Googlers cooked up to attack a genre of site they would like to see leave their party.

(people link to bluewidgets.com with the text "blue widgets")

The single biggest gaming technique employed in Google since the very beginning has been people pounding away at "anchor text" to produce a resultant key word ranking.

This thing reeks of a classic over optimization penalty - the whole things pretty unfortunate, another ill conceived stab at improving the quality of their results by using a broad brush to penalize a type of site they think is "low quality", instead of concentrating on scoring the "quality" sites higher, and letting the weaker ones fall to a natural death. (which technique do you think is easier to accomplish?)

Intentional or not, if its lots and lots of this:

<a href="http://www.bluewidgets.com/" target="_blank">blue widgets </a></p>

pointing to your site, and all in between every page, Google has decided your trying way to hard to get them to know what your sites about.