EMD With Stop Word

[topsailislander]

In my niche, there is an EMD that even though their content, domain age and link profile are very weak, they continue to rank at the number one or number two spot.

So I want to run an experiment and build out a site with better content, etc but have a similar domain.

For example, the site that is ranking higher is (fictitious) shellislandrealestate.com.

I want to create a domain called realestateonshellisland.com

Is the stop word going to hurt my experiment? (the word "on")

Thanks

Chris

[MoosaHemani]

This is interesting that you are actually running an experiment within your industry. As per my research and daily random Google searches I do under different niches I see that this EMD technique works but the weight of it is not much like if someone have a better link profile and content he/she can easily outrank the website with exact match domain.

As far as your core question is concern, the stop word in the domain name should not hurt your experiment!!

My advice on experiment is to keep the link profile low at stage one to see if SERP changes without links on the website or at-least when the link profile is low. At Stage two build some good links back to the profile and see if you are outranking the website that is currently ranking.

I am not sure but sometimes websites with mediocre content contain such links that are hard to beat and that is why they managed main their position on money making keywords.

Best of luck for your experiment!

Regard,
Moosa Hemani.

[JarnoNijzing]

First of all I must Agree with Moosa.

I also ran some experiments like this and by the use of hyphens (for instance separating 2 words with a hyphen in de domainname). Even though my better backlink profile, my higher DA/PA and my better content (more actual, newer, more words, less links in the text) The website still keeps outranking me. But for clients of mine I've been running similar test which in turn show that it is very possible to outrank websites without hyphens, stopwords or The in the URL.

That's why I agree with Moosa. Keep running the experiment in stages and maybe even use your information to write a YouMoz post about it. Could be a very interesting read.

Jarno