Exact Match Domains Still Work (Most SEOs Are Wrong)

A lot of people have asked for an episode just on exact match domains and so that's what we are doing today. David Quaid is joining the show once again. Hey, so glad to be here especially on St. Patrick's weekend. Yeah. All right. So turns Irish. It's a fun weekend. Let me ask you this. Are exact match domains still a ranking advantage or like are they mostly an SEO myth that's left over from the early Google days? Absolutely. um a a a an an advantage in ranking. Um it it's a massive advantage. Google's done a really good job of playing it down. And and they've and and it is it isn't an automatic thing, right? It's it's like parasitic SEO. I think a lot of people think parasitic SEO. I write an article, I publish it on Medium on LinkedIn and boom, I'm just there and I can link to myself and get authority. It doesn't work that way. Uh, all of the guys doing parasitic SEO forget to tell you that the normal rules of SEO apply and they actually do a lot of SEO work to rank those. I I know because I do that all the time. Um, I just came from an argument on LinkedIn when someone was telling me that SEO is fraud and geo is the new thing and SEO doesn't work anymore. And I gave him a picture of me listed as a top AI SEO expert. He's not on the list because he doesn't rank for anything. And I said, "This is because I ranked this list on my own site, my auxiliary domains, and on Reddit." And it didn't get there from Reddit on its own because there's a hundred other SEOs doing the exact same thing, if not a thousand other SEOs. Um, so EMDs are a very powerful play. Um, you were chatting to um a great palm of mine, really amazing uh CMO, Baz De Hoy, uh, wonderful guy. And we are literally rolling out this a similar strategy um, as I am with every project. I think I think that for the last 26 years branded domains have been interesting but I think from the number of people you've spoken to you've got such a a diverse audience so many people talk that you speak to every day uh both on here and on X um having a single domain strategy if you're if that's your income to me seems very very very dangerous um if you think about um digital reputation management having a single domain name in a world with like a like 10 to 100 results seems like a very bad, dangerous, silly idea. And anyone who's had to unfortunately jump into OM at the, you know, at at at the wrong stage when it's too late. The first lesson they learn is that the more domains you own, the more of the narrative on page one you control. And with LLMs, all you have to do is control page one, which it makes it surprisingly easy. Um, Google has a small problem. It doesn't know what what brands are. It doesn't really differentiate between brands. I see a lot of people saying Google loves brands and it rewards brands. No, it doesn't. It doesn't care about brands. It'll sell your brand name to any other advertiser whether they know it or not. You do you do anything other than exact match, your competitor's brands will slip into your paid search campaign. Um, it will let you rank for your competitor's um brand names and there is nothing you can do. You cannot sue Google to take it down. You can block it in ads if you have a trademark, but that's about it. So, if the the way Google knows that Nike and Nike.com are related is because Nike.com is related to Nike. It's it's that simple. Now, what they changed is that if you simply register Nike.co, it doesn't mean you go straight to number one. There's still authority that has to be developed and you have to earn your click-through rate, right? Uh but outside of that, it's a small amount of work. It's a very narrow amount of work, right? like your EMD is likely to rank for that phrase and it's very hard to get it to rank for other phrases, but it's still an important play, especially if you're in an industry or have a business that's dominated by a very powerful commercial keyword. Are you suggesting somebody create their brand as an exact match domain? Like, you know, like you see that there's that famous issue, the famous image of like Thai food near me. That's the name of the restaurant. The restaurant called itself Thai food near me. or are you saying actually have like a branded domain and then create external exact match domains? The second but a lot of affiliates and a lot of um SEO marketers over the last 20 years have done the very first thing which is make the brand their their um their gen or take a generic keyword and build a brand around it. It's the same thing with like for example um load uh free load balancer.com and our biggest competitor and uh he reached out actually on Reddit the week after we had that call that podcast uh and we were talking about it because this happened like 10 years ago their name was freeload sorry it was loadbalancer.org so they actually the stickers on their server appliances said loadbalancer.org So they actually took the generic and made it their own domain name because that was the only way they could compete with us and with Google and Microsoft who were who all got into the load balancing um game with the with the emergence of the cloud because load balances are integral to cloud deployments. So all right in what situations uh would you say that like exact match domains outperform branded domains? Is it just like everything or is it like well like what are you what are you using them for? what's your strategy with EMDs? So, I think with a lot of um businesses, they have like single purpose keywords, right? Um it could be load balancer, it could be um application delivery controller, it could be SAS CRM. So, if you're building um a brand and you're already you're in first place, then this is a good way to build a a backup domain, right? So you can control the f every domain only gets really two results with maybe some site links or if it's your brand maybe you get like seven extra links in your in your footprint on the homepage and everything's up for play. So if you even if you have the first place with your branded domain stealing the un the the generics emds or the kids as I call them that's a that's a good play. one, you don't want your competitors to have them, and two, why don't you want to be the second and third result if if people are searching in LLMs as well and validating results in LLMs, you want those other domains to push out other competitors. So, if you've got 12 competitors and you control the first two results, you you're making the the playing field a lot smaller and and really pushing the odds in your favor. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. Do you see any uh I actually made an episode about automating ex an like exact match domains because you you can just kind of use automation to get an EMD to rank and you don't touch it and you don't have to connect it to Google search console. So Google doesn't even know it's connected to you and you can just automate the whole you can basically automate the whole thing. You can automate the outreach. You can automate directory submissions. You can automate like going after keywords and content iteration. Have you looked into any of that? We actually do have domains that were built automatically for fishing for keyword data. So yes, absolutely have. I didn't skip the step of integrating it in GSC because I don't know that Google watches uh shared domains or shared ownership um for domains. So we actually put them in the same search console and added all the same SEO and web web team and the domains are fully automated from from scratch. They're not PSO domains per se, right? Then they're we gave them some topics to write about and we had different bots do like quality control and make sure bots didn't get lost in the process. Um so they are fully automated but they weren't scaled. They're not like 100page sites and they're they they build content out in phases when we need to. Um, so yeah, absolutely no problem. I don't see any issues there. when I had a I had multiple SEOs on. I think Julian Goldie came on and said like uh when he was scaling AI pages literally they they went through his Google search console and other other people have said like the same thing that Google will go into a Google search console if like the crime is heinous enough and and uh yes but but and so the whole idea with like the automated thing is like you don't even have to connect it to GSC and so like nobody knows it's connected to your brand. So you don't have to Yeah. you don't have to connect domains to GSC, you know, to do SEO. And I I remember when when Julian got uh penalized and I remember watching his his like one of his many live events where he literally put the whole script into Google Sheet, had uh ChattyPD write out the content. Um he after his domains were removed, his other sites like his YouTube channel all ranked perfectly fine. So it's it's funny that Google didn't go after those, right? like his ex account still ranked when you search for Julian Goldie. It's just like his agency and his personal domains left, which I thought was was was really interesting. And I remember I remember him saying he literally like had to ask I don't even know who he asked, but he said he had to ask someone for his like personal domain back or to for it to work again like I wonder if he did a reconsideration request um or if he just asked like John Miller or something on X or or Blue Sky or something. I wonder cuz like he was called out you know that was it was a very you know personally targeted thing. Um now maybe maybe the other domains also had his name in it right so I don't know or also the domains that he had um built I think like one of them was about birds or something uh you know that was in an in a video like he pretty much advertised it and it's also I I actually use it as an example when people say like SEO takes time or is sandboxing a thing if sandboxing is a thing how did he get that site to rank in an hour right so he clearly just like bypassed sandboxing, collected $200, went straight to position one, right? So, if you've got access to the right kind of authority, and I'm sure he doesn't have the same access he used to have. Um, you don't you aren't getting sandboxed. There is no like waiting period. You you just get to go around the board as many times as you want. Um, so yeah, I I'm I'm pretty sure in his instance that that happened, but again, we weren't really looking at um I'm I'm I don't use PSO for scaling and trying to build hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. Um it it's very specific like it could be a job site or it could be an e-commerce site where you're using cookie cutter pages and that it's an interesting topic like how does Google detect machine scale content? That was like in our last uh podcast, right? Cuz like if you're a job site and let's say like AI jobs suddenly appear and you suddenly publish let's say you've got a thousand jobs and in America you've got say 500 cities that's 50,000 pages is that m is that machine scaled content is guacipedia machine scale cont so it's a really interesting question about when do Google uh strike you strike you down for machine scale content because like there's a lot of chatter on X at the moment about machine scale content right what's is there a consensus that you're seeing about machine skill content like SEO machine skill content that you agree with? No. No, definitely not. There's a lot of good arguments, right? There's a lot of good um criteria like if you um if you publish like a couple hundred pages and um you use similar targeting methods that within a few days it starts to drop. But it there are so many other reasons for why that wouldn't work. Um, I don't know if it's like in a space of a week or a space of a month. I just don't know. Uh, so I it's just just a little too early to to comment. Maybe maybe I've actually got to go and do it myself. Maybe I I doain and not put it in my search console this time, right? See if I can if I can replicate it. Are there are there any like uh do you see any branding or trust problems with exact match domains or not? Really? I I I don't I we've done it so many times. the the all of the initial fears tend to um be ellayed. So like if if if you have a a company with a strong branding culture and you you brand the website very well and it matches their they they get less scared the minute people start googling it and they can figure out how to get in touch and and become a lead the all all of the everything evaporates. People are get very very happy. Um, I I think it's just for some cultures like there there's an abject willingness to reject change no matter what. Uh, some I've often accused companies of like having brand police just and and that it kills their innovation um for no reason other than to be brand police. And I I think that's a bad move. And I think that's that's what always creates and fosters an environment for entrepreneurship is these brands just become bogged down bureaucratic systems. And that's why people that go out and adopt and experiment with ex exact match domains win. They get acquired and they add that back up to the parent domain. That's so true about getting bogged down by by bureaucracy and it it creates uh opportunities for entrepreneurs. What uh what signals give exact match domains an advantage when they do rank well? Is it anchor text? Is it relevance? Is it click-through rate? Is it something else? So, it it starts with the domain name itself and then the keywords that you're targeting and then how you uh build up the pages around it and how you essentially curate your topical authority. So, yeah, absolutely. inbound links um matching both the phrase and longtail v variations of the phase phrase uh that you don't start pogo sticking when you do rank. Um another good question that people ask is like how often should you link from your parent domain to your you know your satellite domains or child domains. I I don't know of a threshold. I' I've seen 50 to 100 links. I I do think that after a while the number of links deteriorates the overall value. So, for example, sitewide links, just negate most links. I I I would say like go to 50 links and link page to page. I don't think there's anything wrong with like linking to your child domain and for your child domain linking up to you. Um there obviously is a tipping point where you will where you could flag that you're potentially manipulating. Maybe you could get reported for doing so. I I think it's very rare. Um, so, so you're not using you're not doing exact match domains anonymously. The these like are all the all the EMDs that you do are within the parent brand. No, definitely not. I'd say it's 50/50. Okay. So, you are doing like 50% of them anonymously. Yep. And I' I I I even know of companies that are doing them at arms length. Yeah. Like that they pretend to have no knowledge of that's what I'm saying. Exact match. We have those. We have ones where they're not branded at all and we have ones that are heavily branded that you can't tell the difference. It really depends on the culture of the the company you're working with and what they need to do. Yeah. Like I've seen uh I've seen people they want to rank for like some best keyword and and they'll get the the the best keyword exact match domain uh and the whole whole homepage is like this like deep comparison, you know, and then they're number one in that and you don't nobody can tell something like that. I think if you start setting up like a fake um profile site that then starts to lean heavily towards you and looks biased, that can backfire. Oh yeah. Yeah, that that can definitely backfire. Um but I think I I would say the best 99% of the time the best case is to build the the EMD with your own branding and have it as an asset. It's it's just like having um you know companies have satellite sites, they have franchise sites, they have um licensed partners, right? Like Starbucks owns most of their Starbucks, but inside airports and other locations like Macy's, they license um those additions of Starbucks to those companies. Uh I I think domain should be the same way. I think companies should be free to have multiple domains for languages, for different countries and regions, for different search phrases. You know, Microsoft has a lot of domain names. Nike, I think, has, the last time I checked, they had 27 different domain names at play. Um, mainly for like brands and things like that, you know, um, and subbrands that they own. I I just think it's a great strategy. Um, and until I Yeah. And hate search campaigns, right? If you're spending $180 per keyword and you're spending $200,000 a month, quality score is the main uh quality score is one of the main predictors of cost. Right? So, for example, if a keyword is $100 and your score is 10 out of 10, you can expect a 40 to 60% discount on that $100. If you're a three out of 10, you'll be paying a 60% premium. So you could be paying $160 where someone else is paying 50. That's a big incentive to move to a yet very few people do it. And I think as always, right, uh luck favors the brave. And I don't think it's that risky. You know, I I have a I have a couple of domain names myself. I have a couple of like other brand names. Uh I have one for my own name which I use like as for for monitoring search volume for uh OM uh trying to beat Dennis Quaid at my own name. Right. Damn. I I uh I sent you I sent you yesterday or or two days ago the EMD that I got free seowledge.com and uh I love that. Yeah. And so I I got that for and it 301 redirects to all of my SEO articles. And the reason that I did that is because like every week I write a newsletter. Most of the time it's about SEO, but sometimes it's about social media, sometimes it's about paid ads, sometimes it's just about miscellaneous marketing tricks. And I have on my site, I have my articles divided into these sections. And one of these is is into search engine optimization. And I said, I want to take my audience from Instagram and Tik Tok and send them to my articles. How do I do that? I can't tell them to go to edwardstrom.com/articles/ search engine optimization. That is like way too long. And I want something that's memorable and that makes sense. And so now I'm saying learn SEO for free at free seowledge.com. And just the 301 redirects seamlessly to all of my articles and uh yeah, it's been working really well. But I want to ask, we were talking about like when an EMD might not work. So when does when do EMDs become spammy? I think if you if you overstretch yourself and have too many um I think if you start doing them for you know if you start to use them as as negative SEO or negative against your competitors um if you're selling to an educated buyer which most of us are uh that can really blow up in your face. Um, so if you overstretch yourself and you, you know, again, you still have to build authority to these domains. You still have to manage their ranking, you have to manage them as website infrastructure, right? It's not free ranking, right? Um, just as building a branded domain isn't free marketing. So if if you can't manage it and you can't get authority to it, then then it's going to run out. Uh, but if you can manage 10, then have at it, you know, I don't see why not. The other problem as well is that a lot of people get authority from things like activities like blogging. Uh when you've got 10 domain names, you you know it gets difficult to run more than two blogs. It can get difficult to remember where articles are that you're going to share on social media. Uh most of your social media profile sites only have one domain out. So it can get harder and harder to build those domains up. So unless the keyword comes with a lot of traffic, there's a diminished return investment. Um so I I would say start with one and see how that goes over 3 months. But do you have a system uh for how you actually manage um yeah investment between doing SEO for the main brand and for the EMD? Um, it could be like a rule like where 20% of the content goes to the satellite domains and 80% goes to the parent. Or in other areas it's just it's it's much easier like all the thought leadership content goes on the parent domain and then you either write derivatives of that or it's just like uh PMM work or 10% goes to the satellite domain. So it it it just varies. Um uh what we try to do is keep the overall cost of the domain at less than probably less than 5% of the parent domain. So one easy way to do that is just to copy the brand guidelines, the logo, not have to repeat all of that. Um find a very easy managed CMS. So, um if you're if you're using Strappy or something complicated for your um parent domain for your EMD, try and find something simpler like Wix or Web Flow or WordPress. Um I use WordPress for the majority of them. It works fine and it's easy to manage and it's like we can just copy out exactly our setup that we need. I have a question for you. on your domain exact match domain names that you're 301. Can you tell what traffic they're bringing in or how many people click on it or Oh, uh, well, I used to be able to when I was using the redirection plugin. Can I do it? Cuz now I have the 301 redirect set up with Cloudflare. It's It's like so fast. Uh, okay. Have I I haven't actually specifically looked recently. And basically what I'm just doing is I'm literally just looking at Google Analytics now and I'm just seeing okay is there an increase in these in visitors to these pages and I'm like yep it's like because I just started I just started sharing free SEO knowledge.com like two days ago in videos and immediately immediately I'm seeing I'm seeing email signups from these pages from adwordstrom.com/articlesarchine optimization seeing so many email signups from Uh, I am seeing people going and reading the articles and I'm like, okay, this is like this seems to be working. I haven't looked at exact numbers. Could I figure out a way to do it? I'm sure that I could, but I haven't I haven't done it in months because at the end of last year, I switched all of my 31 redirects to Cloudflare. I was doing it I was using WordPress sites and using the redirection plugin which tracked all of that. And uh, but Cloudflare Cloudflare 301 redirects are instant. they're so much better. They're they're so fast and and so I switched to that and uh yeah. And are you going to use that for SEO where if people search for that phrase either the domain ranks or the page that it links to ranks or have you gotten to that far? I basically the reason I want the reason I'm even doing this is because I don't want to go and personally build links to edwards.com/archine optimization. I should like it would be it it would be the smart thing to do. It's just like I I'd have to hire somebody I don't want to do it myself. I don't have the time. I'd have to hire somebody to do it and I might do that. Uh but for now like a very like I have a big audience. So a very lowhanging fruit thing for me to do is to just send qualified people to these articles. And maybe because my audience is so big, some people will just share them naturally. And that's basically why I'm doing because it like for me to buy the domain and for and to set up the 301 redirect and to share it in videos is so fast and easy. And I'm doing that because I don't have time to build links to to the hub page for all of these articles, which is what I should be doing. That would be the like definitely the more effective thing to do. It's just like if I do that, then I'm spending less time on the podcast or less time on videos. So I I need to really need to hire somebody to just build links for me. I think it sounds like a pretty good hack though. I think a lot of other companies could do that. Like if they have like documentation centers or demo signups or like calculators that they want to send people to like you could like have like sascal.com and just drop that as a 30. Oh, it's great. I I actually I had uh Cody Schneider on who's like a legendary growth hacker and he's he's like, "Yeah, I got this from you and I'm and I've been doing it because it's memorable free SEO knowledge." Like it's like you buy you get something that's memorable and you do that. And how much did you pay for that to me? Dude, for the for three years it was like $45. But but I was looking at like SEO knowledge or SEO wisdom. Those ones are tens of thousands of dollars. If you just want something like SEO wisdom, it's tens of thousands. Like really expensive. But for what you paid for it, that's a steal. That's crazy. Brilliant to me. And that's what I like. That's what I like about keyword in domains is you don't have to spend $100,000 or a million dollars. You just need a partial match. It's good enough for me, right? You can use hyphens, you can use CCTLs, you can use all the new TLDDs that have come out. You don't have to have the com. The com doesn't matter. No, I It's not that the matters. I want something I wanted something that sounded catchy in videos because like I bought this to say in videos. And if if I say like free- SEO-nowledge, it doesn't have the same effect. I meant for for ranking purposes. Oh yeah, for sure. For ranking purposes, you want something it's easy to remember. You don't want to have to like remember alpha numerical numbers. It's just not And I mean, I'm literally using this for a 301 redirect. So like it's it's a it's it's still kind of different. I mean, but actually, so for you when you are buying an exact match domain, like what do you look for before spending the money? Um, so I almost never buy um domain names that are very expensive with the exception I bought a legal domain a couple of weeks ago for an experiment. Um, I think it was like NYC legal expert or something and I think it it fell off domain for $400 and I think that's probably the most I've spent in 2 years. uh what I try to do is look at what are the top keywords in search console by impressions and who do who where are we facing the strongest competition and where are we spending the most paid search and that help that sort of helps me find it and so if it's like say let's just say it's like sassoft software.com and that's not available that's like a million dollars then I look at like bestsasoftware.com or topsoft software.com and those variations are almost always available orn net will be available and then that's good enough for me. Um because I don't need people to remember the the the subdomain. I need or sorry the satellite domain. I need people to remember the brand name or to get to the brand. So I don't really care. And if you look at LLMs, people will almost never click on the sources. It doesn't really matter. So if you're getting your brand mention into the first um citation or the whatever you want to call it, um that's that's good enough, right? You know, we have like so many amazing SEO tricks just like ways to rank for competitive keywords like people also ask, you know, you you put up pages targeting people also ask questions and then you rank for these because nobody else is is targeting them and then you funnel that authority into pages that target more competitive keywords. So, how do you decide between when you want to get an exact match domain to rank for things versus when you just want to use uh your your SEO techniques to rank for those on the main site? If I'm up against someone who's whose authority I just cannot match, right? So like a Microsoft um the reason I I I I wanted to work with freeload balancer.com was because we were up against EngineX, F5, Haroxy, um company, you know, sites that or organizations that had massive user networks. Um they had real social media, real branding. We just we had no hope. Um even though we had like 200,000 visits a month, that was the apex we got to. And so we I think we got we fell off page one for load balancer and we just couldn't climb back up. Uh Google were out bidding us on ads for load balance. I had to write a letter to the Google ethics committee who actually did a side with me and they they stopped Google cloud from running ads on load balancer. Um, but they were eating up like we was we had to spend an extra $17,000 a month that soon went up above $70,000 just on the word load balancer because Google Cloud effectively had an unlimited budget. And I said that was ethically unfair. Um, that we'd been a Google customer for like 15 years and they were doing and they they blocked the ads from running. Wow. I don't think a lot of people realize you can do that. Um, so where either where I want to cover us like take over page one or where I can't get the branded domain any higher then it it makes a lot more sense. Then it becomes almost like non-negotiable. Yeah. So so there's just a level of competitiveness where you're where you say you know it just it doesn't make sense to do it with the branded site and it's going to be it's going to be years before we can rank for this keyword. basically like the amount of like links and marketing and everything that we need to do to rank for this keyword without an EMD, it's going to be years and it's just it was relatively it was relatively easy to outrank Google for load balancer. Um Microsoft was very hard because Microsoft have been building load balancers since the 1990s. So it was and they've they've got like 17 different brand names. So Microsoft was very very hard. F5 and Citrix which were the accounted for probably 80% of the market were very very difficult to outrank for what were what and you ranked for the keyword load balancer you ranked number one we did we ranked number one for a very short period and then the market got bigger and bigger and we just got pushed further and further out and then once once cloud the cloud came and Microsoft started to challenge um AWS and they renamed it um Azure then the then it that's when we underwater. We couldn't compete anymore. That's where free load balancer came and then we started ranking for free load balancer. You started ranking for free load balancer. Yeah. So Microsoft and Google have a lot of free load balancing infrastructure and then they charge for like more complicated features and so we came up with a free ver version. Also, Engine X which was a community built product uh launched their sort of like more sophisticated application delivery controller at went and got venture capital funding but they were using engine X as their brand and so they were getting a lot of free traffic and authority from that and so in order to compete with that we had to come up with like a premium version of our product which which is still there. If you had 10 grand to spend on uh on a domain or or let's just say on like SEO, would you spend it on an exact match domain or building a brand domain? Um for me, probably an exact match domain. Yeah. If if it was a because it's just the fastest way to revenue and especially if I'm if I'm targeting acquisition. I've like um like if you see this behind me here, that was a brand we re we rebranded camp. It cost us a million dollars and then we were acquired like 11 months later. Um so and it's a it's a buried brand now. So I I would 100% go with the exact match domain build that if I'm especially if I'm target being targeted for acquisition. Yeah, 100%. No, wouldn't have to think twice about it. All right, so I have a bonus question and it's not about EMDs. Uh, it's it's I I sent this to you, but we didn't we didn't actually talk about it. So, I'm eager to hear your answer. When and yeah, not about exact match domains. When when somebody claims that generative engine optimization, so like getting getting AI to recommend your brand, when somebody claims that generative engine optimization is different from SEO because in SEO, you get the top result and you're good. But in geo, in generative engine optimization, you need consensus in the SER. That's what people that's what these people say. They say you need consensus in the SER and with SEO all you do is rank number one and they say it's it's different because of that. How do how do you respond to those claims that geo is different from SEO? I think consensus really applies more to listicals. Um if if it's if if it's 10 brands ranking in search results and um then it will typically read from each one. um the answer is always going to be random. I have seen a number of really odd behaviors where you could be in three different um lists. Uh so I again because I I am testing and experimenting and I'm playing with multiple lists like top a SEO agencies, top this, top that. I have noticed that the changes in grounding have have been applied where like if you recommend yourself, you're less likely to be recommended in the list. And I've noticed that as I've expanded that, I've noticed that some brands still got dropped off. And I noticed that some people who only mention once get show. So I I've seen a more inconsistency than consistency about grounding. The second thing I've noticed, I've had a couple of uh let's say fun conversations with geo agencies who've told me that SEO is fraud and you should stop doing SEO and it's over and you're behind the times and you know my my typical response is to reply back and go like how how come I'm in a list of recommended people and you're not right. And yeah, yeah, I created the list, you know, and and and I've as a result of creating the list, I've appeared in many other lists subsequently downstream. Um what's interesting is that a lot of geo brands have reached out to me and clients. Uh and a friend of mine in Ireland who who's got a HR website, a company in Sweden who have absolutely no web traffic said like oh we saw your top blog post on this. Can you list us? And the CEO is like he's really nice guy and he emailed me and said can you do this? And I'm like no why why are we giving another brand time on your page right? And and they're presumably using one of these geo tools that's like you don't have to rank. You can just piggy back off this company. So maybe that's worked up till now, but that's a very shortlived strategy. So if Gio's only difference is that um you can rank on someone else's page. Um sure, if it's G2, you're going to pay for it. If it's um if it's a link farm, you're going to have to pay for it. Um it also potentially introduces like um if people are saying, "Look, we'll we'll pay you $500 for linking to us." What if someone says, "Look, I'll pay you $3,000 to remove everyone else, right? Why can't that happen?" And so, if that's the state at play, then owning that position yourself and having an EMD to support it becomes more more of an imperative. If if if your company is making a h 100red million or you're making 50 million a year and you're targeting 150 million as as a valuation, you need to own that position or I'm sorry, your company isn't worth anything. I'm that's how I view it. Right? So, um the idea that geo is somehow different from SEO because their focus is different. I'd say no. There's there's three levels to this. A lot of geos are saying that because the prompt is different to the query that somehow gio has different citation. Right? So there's a whole fabricated story that they're making up that says well if you search for top SEO experts and then you go to Gemini or you go to chatbt and it comes up with a different set of list. That's because the drift changes and they modify the query. The list is still the list. So if you're in SEO and you don't understand that you can change what you rank for then you're not really SEO. that doesn't mean you're in geo. So in SEO, you can absolutely rank for more than one thing or more than one variation. We just used to call it longtail. So that's not really much of a differentiator. Um the fact that you can email another company and put your name on a list. Sure, that's novel and new, but as a CEO, I would see that as okay, let's that's a short gap. We we let's do it and if it works, fine, but let's also make sure we get a a a domain property in there that we own. And then in terms of the grounding, um, I've been playing a lot with that. Um, I've been testing with Cloudflare on and off, for example, just to see if I've turned all of the Cloudflare bot ballers on and off and still blocked myself from Claude and I I I eventually had to strip Cloudflare off. So if you are trying to rank in LLMs maybe and you you've got Cloudfare in front of you, make sure you test it cuz I tested and the only way to get into Claude and Perplexi and Grock was to take it off. Even though I had, you know, turned off the the option to to allow AI crawlers in. So if you don't allow AI crawlers, what happens is let's say you've got a list like top SAS products or top SEOs in New York. Um when Google returns you as a result set, the crawler goes to fetch your page. if it can't fetch your page, you you fall out of that list immediately. Um, and so I tested it and it took about 24 hours to get back into the list. Um, and then I found that like if you've got a domain name called davidquay.com and you put yourself as on top of the list, you stand a good chance of being removed. So uh in that instance an exact match domain is very very helpful because the LLMs do not have the same technology as as Google does. They don't have Google business profile. They don't have Google search console. Uh so that just another good reason to to do that which actually dovetales nicely. Oh wait so I I got to ask about Cloudflare because because like what is it like 20% of the internet uses Cloudflare and you're saying that that it's actually hurting your visibility in LMS. what specific instances is that? So we were facing a denial of service attack, a persistent denial of service attack and um from a couple of different vectors. One was through Google ads. So we had to we had to attack it from a couple like Google ad support were completely useless. Um, and so we put in Cloudflare and we were able to stabilize traffic, remove a lot of bot traffic, get rid of a lot of uh traffic that was coming from specific countries. And I knew that Cloudflare by default blocked some AI callers. I there was I don't know if it was like a PR. Can you explain what you mean by you put in Cloudflare? Okay, so Cloudflare is a service that sits on the web. It provides um a web application firewall, a load balancer, bot detection, various security mechanisms. Sometimes you'll access a web page and it'll present with like a are you a human or bot check. Quite often that's Cloudflare. So Cloudflare is like a pre-security. So you take your DNS, you write your IP address through Cloudflare and it interrupts the traffic, checks to see if it's real or if it's um malware or if it's somehow bad for your site or a denial of service attack and handles it. Um, and after the whole thing about like should you allow bots to train on you and I think training has been overestimated. I don't think there's as much training as people think. I think it's more QFO than training. Um, Cloudflare came out and said we're going to by default block AI bots. Uh, so that basically it's up to the publisher to say whether they want the AI bots. I don't think that if for most sites are being included in any training program. It's literally when people ask a prompt and it goes to search engine and you're ranking in the search, it retrieves your data there and then live in the moment. And I think that makes up 90% of it if not more because the web is so huge, right? You can't put that kind of storage in in an LLM instance, right? So if you've what we did is we put Cloudflare up put it in between worked for most things. We got we stopped all of the DDoS attacks and and the ads attacks and then I noticed that for Claude uh I was trying a couple of other tools. Uh Cloudflare was blocking the robots and I tried everything. I try I went through all of the um settings. I went through all of the forums. I asked on X. I unticked and ticked all the boxes. And your robots your robots.xt was completely open and I checked that the robots was using mine and not cloud flares and all of that. So, um, the only way to do it on Friday morning, we removed Cloudfare. It took about like 4 hours for DNS propagation. And then when I went to check last night, um, all of the LLM results we were back in. So, are you going to keep using Cloudflare now? Just for just so you can be cited in Cloud. Absolutely. Yeah, I want to be cited and clawed. That's I I'm I'm like that's what that's what I'm here for is visibility, right? I'm not here creating content that's like IP protected. Are you going to use I want people to read my Are you going to use something uh to replace Cloudflare? If I had another DOS attack, I would probably provision a load balancer myself because I can do it myself because I worked at a load balancing company for 10 years, 12 years. That's cool. So I I would just fire up the load balancer myself and if if if if I just saw traffic coming from IP addresses I didn't like I would just put them into a null interface like a null address. That's crazy that that cloud or that that Claude is not able Claude is not citing domains using Cloudflare even when all the Cloudflare settings are open to LLM. I'm not saying I'm not saying that I did the most comprehensive test. I'm not saying I'm a qualified CloudFare person. Someone from Cloudflare could point out that I did something wrong or left something unturned. I just gave up after two days myself contacting Cloudflare. So I've I paid for like a certain level of Cloudflare. I think it cost me like $400. Um and that only gave me uh community support. We raised a web ticket, but we didn't get a response. And every time I searched for it or I asked about it, there was just one option and that one was already unticked and I couldn't find anything else. So I I I don't know. I got to get somebody from Cloudflare on the show. No, I'm I'm serious. I mean I I'm not I So I just want to be clear. I'm not saying to people they shouldn't use Cloudflare. I just said I personally won't be running back to them in a heartbeat. Um because it didn't help with the DOS attack that we were experiencing. um we eventually figure out how to get get through to Google Ads um who were essentially facilitating someone else buying ads for my domain name. And then that goes back to me saying that look, Google doesn't know who they don't know that a brand name and a domain name are are linked. They so I could essentially run ads to your domain name and I could buy uh display traffic for 1 cent per thousand clicks from another country whose whose currency is is highly deflated against the dollar. and I could saturate your domain name with traffic in an hour for $10. You know, was also uh I just wanted to touch upon how it's very interesting how you said that like self-promotion listicles actually get you removed now. It actually it is anti the results that you want. It was a change that I saw and I I thought to myself, I wonder how well they've implemented this change. And um when you interrogate the the LLMs it was like oh you know this person now now it says like for example like oh well David is promoting himself so there could be some bias in that and it depend it varies from LLM to LLM um uh but if you suddenly posted in Reddit under uh your separate handle it it no longer has the tools to interrogate that anymore and so you can bypass you know why this is really crazy because so many agencies were going and making self-promotion listicles for their clients for LLMs and and like it for for a while, you know, Lily Ray did her research and showed that that it it just like Google was actually de-indexing a lot of these articles and so people just kind of concluded, okay, it's not working anymore. But now you're saying not only is it not working when when they do show up, it's actually hurting you. It's hurting you. Is that correct? So I can't speak for every use case, right? I've I've only been, like I said, I I'll always practice things on my own domain first. And so I've been playing with about 30 different search phrases around say like best legal SEO agency, best SEO consultant, best SEO expert, best SEO influencer, best SEO podcast. Uh I'll typically throw my friends into the list. I tried one with like a to see if I could get names removed. Remember we talked about this X and I was like, "Hey, you know, remove these people from the list." And maybe that was not the I thought it was funny, but I have a weird sense of humor. I maybe should check my sense of humor with other people, but um I did notice that um for a lot of instances my name was removed and so that's what that's when I started to dig into Cloudflare. And then um I also noticed that it would say this particular brand or this particular person has put their own name in their own list and so I've decided to remove it and but I don't know how good it is. It could have been that it absolutely um I I checked it. I I would say it was relevant 80% of the time. But I also noticed that people that I had put in the list that I knew without a shadow of doubt were on no other list showed up. And that's what I can't reconcile. And so one of the comments I got back from Perplexity is I didn't do mathematical rating. So, for example, if you go to Perplexity or Gemini and say, "What are the top posts on on Reddit about SEO?" It doesn't go to Reddit and count all of the it doesn't do a search. It it actually searches for what are the most common topics on Reddit and then you could get a a blog post written by a marketing person who says, "Well, the most common topics are," and it could be completely made up, right? And so when I started to see that other people's names that weren't being replicated, I started to realize, okay, there's something weird here. Um, and it's very difficult cuz you can't really trust an LLM and ask it how it works. It doesn't know how it works. How it works. Um, but these message messages were new. Like I remember the first time I published a list, I was cited within seconds, right? And then after a while as more and more people were playing the same game it started to change started to change and and it becomes difficult because if you see your own name it doesn't mean other people see your name right like if you go like well how how come I don't see Bob here and go oh sorry Bob you should be there then it tells it puts Bob back in for you but you don't you know if you go and check on Jeff's machine is are is your name still going to be there. Um, and I I assume people I assume they do that to to plate people and and and so I I it's like one of those things more research required. Still very interesting if that if like if something like that happened. Can you imagine the maelstrom the that would be such a disaster because like this there's companies that are venture capital funded to do that, right? That's their entire mission statement is to produce those listicles. And it's not like and it it's it's not like the AI companies don't know. No, they know. No. And I've often thought to myself like, wow, I wonder if like that agency would like mind if I put their name and then I did a Google search to find that they had the list anyway. So, I was like, fair game. Yeah. I uh it's just um So, let me ask you this. Um, would you use self-promotional listicles on client domains or your own sites anymore? So, what I do is um I I don't like to bring attention to like competitors domains like unless we're doing like a comparison, right? Um, what I do is actually just I prefer to do a chain a variation in the search phrase and Google just doesn't know any better. And so, for let's just go back to the SAS CRM because it's like a makeyuppy thing. Um, I would just do top 10 SAS CRM features and then just list my top 10 SAS CRM CRM features in the page and that's as good that's good enough. Yeah, but that's that's top 10 SAS CRM features is different from targeting just like the top the top it is s top. Yeah, but I can get it to rank for top CRM. You could could you? Yeah, I I did a So it's CRM has to be a crazy competitive keyword. So again, the competition is down to one, how well your competition, how good your competition is at shifting authority to the page. So if they were just relying on their own topical authority, that becomes beatable, right? If they've got only 10 links to that page and half the links are branded, it's a numeric game, right? So, there's also a difference with HTML pages, doc pages, and PDF pages, unlike the other 53 types of documents that Google supports. Those pages have a page title, which is 50% of the relevancy score. So, ads has a quality score, organic results have a relevant score. So, of the relevant score, the page title is 50%, the slug is the other 50%. You don't have to put the same keywords in both. If you've got the slug matching the target, you can overcome it. I'm looking at top uh top CRM right now as a keyword because I'm just I'm very curious about the SER. I want to see I want to see what the SER is like. And uh it's loading. Okay. Oh my god. I don't work What did you say? I don't work for any CRM companies. I just Oh, this is just an example. Okay. All right. All right. Because because uh yeah, top CRM is a crazy crazy. If it would say like top podcasting microphones, I could write a page that's called top podcasting microphone features that can rank in top podcasting microphone. When you say rank in it, do you just mean rank in the top 10, rank in the top three? Rank number one, five. Yeah, exactly. That's that's that's all you need for an LLM, right? Okay. Okay. So, you're saying rank in the top. Yeah, I could I I suppose I could see that. Yeah. Top. I And that's another thing that makes geo, if anything, slightly easier than SEO is you just have to be in the top 10. You also are often ranking for key phrases that actually are lower competition than you would find as the highest keywords in Google, right? So there I'll accept that gio is different. It's easier than SEO. So, if you're looking for a good geo agency, then a good SEO agency is a good place to start. David, thank you for coming on the show. Dude, I you know, this was like supposed to be like a 15minute episode. I was just always have so much fun talking to you about SEO. Like, we always just end up vibing and like, oh, Cloudflare, like what's what's happening? Wait, self-promotional listicals are are actually getting people hurt. Like, can you tell me more about that? Like, and uh yes, now we have like now we have a content for another four podcasts. Oh, yeah. and I'm hyped. Yeah. So, um, everybody, I hope you enjoyed the discussion on exact match domains. A lot of people were asking just for like a more EMD specific episode and, uh, yeah. Uh, all right. This is episode f. Please find David in the description for this episode. Go and follow him on everything. David is awesome. This is his 1 millionth time on the podcast and he will be back a million more times. This is uh, episode 985 of the Edward Show. 985 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.