Short EMD or Longer Partial MD: Which is better for SEO

[Web3Marketing87]

Hey Guys,

I appreciate all of the amazing responses you have been posting over the last two days.
I have been a little tied up with Joomla 1.5 transfers, but I will make some comments soon!

In the meantime, here is an interesting one: I have an existing domain with a little bit of DA - www.edmontonweb.ca as well as a parked domain with no DA - launchwebdesign.ca

I have been advised to redirect (301) to the launch domain, but I still wonder if the current domain is better - after all it is very short & was registered over 5 years ago. Since launching the new site it has been about a month. We are currently #1 for almost every term on Bing & Yahoo (web design, edmonton web design etc.) but 14th on Google for "edmonton web design."

Do you think switching the domain is a good call, or keep trying with edmontonweb.ca for a bit longer?

Thanks guys,

Anton

[dotfly]

I dont see any advantage if you switch from a well-established (5 year old) domain that is already ranking in good positions to a brand new one. Its a hard job and a lot of work and even if you redirect the old to the new one there will occure some changes. I would also recommend to redirect the new domain to the old one.

I general it is a popular opinion that "EMD" is a little bit better than just "PMD" and the shorter, the better BUT this is not a written law. If you do an overall good job these aspects won`t have such a big effect on your rankings.

[BenjaminMorel]

I wrote a post a couple of months ago which analysed a load of Mozcast data and one of the subjects I touched upon was EMDs and PMDs. Looking at that data I'd say don't bother switching domains.

The reason, to quote directly from the post is that

"Looking purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial (PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listing"

The conclusion was that

"if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you stick to your branded domain."