How important is an exact match domain?

As the title says, how important is an exact match domain?? I am asking because my friend has a site with a good amount of visitors from search engines, and I have found a related keyword which might be profitable. I want to write content on this site itself since it is already indexed by google and has a decent page rank. But since the exact keyword is not in the domain name, I'm wondering if I'd be better off creating a site from scratch, with the keyword in it? Will not having an exact match domain hurt my chances of ranking in the top spots for that keyword??

Not important at all, just one of many ranking factors but they are becoming less and less effective.

After the last google EMD algorithm update (more than a year back), there is pretty much no benefit to having an exact match domain. Infact I personally prefer a partial match - brandable domain name to an EMD.

Niki

Not worth to chase the emd, you can rank without it.

Cheers

nikita12 said:

After the last google EMD algorithm update (more than a year back), there is pretty much no benefit to having an exact match domain. Infact I personally prefer a partial match - brandable domain name to an EMD.

Niki

Click to expand...

I am sorry, I disgree.

There is no longer a bonus to having an EMD any more, but having your keyword in the URL is still very powerful.

Just use the keyword in the page title on the existing site, and you are in like Flynn.

All my EMDs are ranking in top 3.

Experience beats opinion.

It can be helpful but is not essential. More benefit in Bing than google

just having the keyword in domain is always useful.

Yes I am agree with this that having keyword in the url is still powerful... When we search in search engines.. for any good keywords.. the result display are most the list which are good url of that keywords. As per google it is not important to have keywords in url but it is still working I think.

Keyword is better than no keyword. but over optimisation (especially combined with blackhat style SEO) will cause you to loose ranks.

not that great anymore, just check the amount of dropped EMD's you have available now.
As long as your backlink profile is strong EMD does not matter anymore.

EMD is fine and no EMD is fine as well.