Exact-Match Dashed Domain St-Patricks-Day.com Steals #2 Spot In Google

I always like to see which sites rank well for popular holidays, and one of my favorite holidays is coming-up tomorrow (but celebrated by many today) – Saint Patrick’s Day. So I did a Google search to see who was in the top three on Google for the term, here’s what I got:

Saint Patricks Day Google

As you can see good old Wikipedia is in the #1 spot followed by St-Patricks-Day.com. Yes, a dashed exact-match domain is outranking the History.com official page about Saint Patrick’s Day.

Just goes to show as I’ve said many times, exact-match domains aren’t dead, sure sites that have really crappy content and low-quality backlinks are but they don’t seem to set the bar too high. Take a gander at the site and you’ll see it’s not full of top-notch content, in fact it’s a bit sloppy with ads strewn about the page.

st-patricks-day-com

So what gives? Huge ads poorly placed in between some very low-quality content like this like that has an underscore for some reason in the sentence, “Imagine more than 100_something million people across the planet doing exact same thing…” That’s some sloppy content-writing, but it’s still ranking.

How is it ranking so well? Looking at the backlink profile I can see it has some pretty solid backlinks from people like Financial Times and DMOZ so in the end the backlinks are saving it. Still, didn’t Google say it was crushing all these exact-match domains full of ads and junky content?

It just goes to show, exact-match domains might not be as dead as everyone would like you to believe.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton