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by tyingq 3428 days ago
To be fair, Google and other search engines encouraged that view for quite some time. Naive treatment of anchor text as context...

Also, I'm pretty sure browsers used to tack on ".com" before the current behavior of passing unadorned strings in the URL bar to the search engine.
1 comments
tyingq 3427 days ago
Mystified by the downvote. Matt Cutts talked about the unintentional SEO advantage of exact match domains, publicly, and later they released an algorithm change to fix it.

And, I was "pretty sure", but searched a bit. My memory was right. Browsers used to tack ".com" onto things you would type into the url bar. The search box was separate at the time. Firefox, for example, had a setting called "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" defaulting to "on" that made this the default behavior.

These kind of domains did, at one time, have a notable built-in advantage.

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H4CK3RM4N 3427 days ago
These domains would still have their advantage if they managed to get big before the omnibox took over, wouldn't they?
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tyingq 3427 days ago
If they established a following, yes. Someone mentioned "blinds.com", still #1 for "blinds" in the US. Furniture.com is also ranking well for "furniture". The number one result for "cars" is "cars.com". Hats.com is #2 for "hats", and so forth...
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