"How To" Counts in EMD?

Anyone knows if I search for "How To Eat Chicken" and have an EMD HowToEatChicken.com would that rank better than EatChicken.com?

Sure and it also may help you rank for other long tails too.

So if your site is called "howtoeatchickeninkansas" You will likely rank for terms like "how to eat chicken in kansas", How to eat chicken, how to eat as well as eat chicken if you have good content and link build correctly

yes, it will rank for the long tail and short tail keyword as well

Thanks, but the weird thing is that if I search "how to do something" and there are EMDs in the results, only "do something" are highlighted. I thought that common words "how, to, and, or, etc." would be excluded from EMD ranking increase

In my personal experiences, the long tail EMD works much better. Im running a how to right now. Barely sent any links to it. Its at page 3 for one of its high search volume keywords.

In my opinion, you only get a boost in Google when the query exactly matches your domain (not just a part of it).

People rank for the partial matches because those words are in the anchor text of which they promote their site, its in their on-site optimization, etc. However, there is no "EMD bonus" received for ranking for the partials, any more than you would have received for a domain that doesn't have the keywords in them at all.

If there is some sort of boost by having a partial match, it isn't anywhere near as much as having the exact match.

Ask yourself this question:

If I were a Google engineer and I wanted to decrease the value of an EMD how would I do it?

1. devalue domains with "how to" in them
2. devalue domains that are long and have multiple words

Google wants authority. How authoratitve is an EMD with howto in it. No one registers a legit domain name with howto in it

daveguy said:

Ask yourself this question:

If I were a Google engineer and I wanted to decrease the value of an EMD how would I do it?

1. devalue domains with "how to" in them
2. devalue domains that are long and have multiple words

Google wants authority. How authoratitve is an EMD with howto in it. No one registers a legit domain name with howto in it

Click to expand...

Google may or may not devalue EMDs. I think I've read that Matt Cutts was saying they may devalue EMDs. However, as things stand right now ... EMDs are not devalued.

What you're talking about here though almost sounds like a penalty. If anything, and EMD will be neutral (no bonus given) ... certainly there won't be a penalty for having keywords in the domain.

Whether or not a site has authority built up has nothing to do with being too long or having keywords in it, that is an entirely different part of Google's algorithm whether to give authority to a domain.

Almost every version of any decent domain name is already being squatted, domain names are getting longer because that is all there is left to register -- certainly Google isn't going to penalize people for getting crappier long domains because that's all you can register nowadays.

phpbuilt said:

In my opinion, you only get a boost in Google when the query exactly matches your domain (not just a part of it).

People rank for the partial matches because those words are in the anchor text of which they promote their site, its in their on-site optimization, etc. However, there is no "EMD bonus" received for ranking for the partials, any more than you would have received for a domain that doesn't have the keywords in them at all.

If there is some sort of boost by having a partial match, it isn't anywhere near as much as having the exact match.

Click to expand...

I agree with this 100% as far as the EMD importance but I also think that the anchor text from backlinks will help with the long and shorter versions of the KW's plus it should be all over the on page as well giving you a boost in Serps.