I have several exact match domain names and they all stayed the same or went up in the rankings. You can search for practically anything and see exact match domain names doing quite well at the moment. As others have said, the Penguin update had absolutely nothing to do with domain names. It targeted link spam (also called web spam). If you had a link on a blog, forum, article or any other website and that link to your website was not relevant to the article or to the website, it was devalued. Sitewide links (sidebars, banners in the header or footer) were also devalued to a great degree because they only now get counted as one link - not a link on every page of the website. Many people went through the last year or so prescribing to the "a link is a link" philosophy and tossed up links anywhere they could get them. Chances are, the starter of this thread had quite a few manufactured irrelevant links pointing to his exact match domain names, which is what brought him down to where he should have been before all of the link spam was self-created.
+1 I hope this is true. Based on other things we know, it seems like something that'd make sense for Google to do. I mean, people are selling spammy links left and right and that is what made Google great. So by cleaning up links they're sticking to what got them the #1 SE spot in the first place. Thanks for telling us it prob doesn't have to do with exact match domains. That's telling.
Ya! but there are less people use Bing/Yahoo. So we have to change our self according to Google's rules and regulation.
My experience is somehow different from you. After few recent updates, most of the time I found good and related information as my search result.
Interesting information. But can anyone tell me the steps or process to maintain its position in the search engine. How can we maintain our position in the search engine?supersy.com
My two-month old EMD recently became #1 in the US (the query gets about 1k exacts in the US)... after this update, it's still #1.
Well, I was pushed by Penguin to start acting smarter and do SEO better quality. It become harder but still works. Well it is game of survival so the strongest will come up to top. What works for me is long tail anchors, title as an anchor, to place links slow and from better quality and authority sites form pages with relevant content. If some one knows more tricks please share (only if tested please).