Three observations this week that are directly relevant to anybody doing SEO or social video.
YouTube SEO is still crazy.
I made this video about EMDs in SEO (if you don’t know what EMDs are, don’t worry, the next thing on this list describes it).
I wanted to show up for the top-of-funnel search, “EMDs in SEO.”
Top-of-funnel SEO through one’s own website is competitive.
Top-of-funnel SEO through UGC (user-generated content), especially YouTube, is a lot easier.
In my quest to have high top-of-mind awareness in SEO, I often think about what relevant keywords I can use in my video descriptions so that I’ll take up more market share.
In this specific case, I made my video’s title, “EMDs in SEO – Exact Match Domains – are crazy.” I made the first sentence of the video the same thing. Then I used the transcript from the video for the rest of the description.
This was 3 days ago.
EMDs in SEO are indeed crazy.
EMD stands for exact match domain. This means you have a domain (yourwebsite.com) that exactly targets a keyword you want.
Historically, this has been seen as a controversial practice in SEO.
It works for many individual keywords, but on the other hand it’s not good for brand (these days domains like this sound very spammy) and there are even indicators that Google’s algorithms can demote sites just for having exact-match names.
The May 2024 Google Leak revealed that, “Google has adjusted its algorithm to demote sites that rely solely on EMDs without providing substantial value. This prevents low-quality sites from gaming the system based on their domain names alone.”
And this is why the following finding was so crazy.
A Semrush affiliate bought the exact match domain shown in the image below as well as relevant backlinks to the domain.
The domain also had a lot of content on it. You can view it with Wayback Machine here.
The result:
This EMD ranked #1 above Semrush for its own brand name. Crazy.
The domain no longer works, however.
This finding went viral across much of the SEO community and it’s likely this goes against Semrush’s affiliate ToS.
So not only does the domain no longer work, the backlinks have also been removed.
Nonetheless, this is a crazy example of EMDs working very well (until the SEO community blows it all up).
I removed 4,900 followers on Instagram. Here’s what I found.
Instagram has this feature for anybody with over 1,000 followers called, “Remove flagged for review followers.”
At 97,000 followers I had 4,900 marked as flagged.
Before deciding to remove them, I did a ton of research and found:
- Very occasionally, way more followers are removed than Instagram predicts. Example: “I did it and it removed 11k from my account, it only told me I had 5 spam accounts 😞🙃🙃 don’t do it.”
- The consensus, however, is that removing these flagged followers leads to increased engagement. “One person used it and immediately had views increase by 300%. Another person used it and Reels that were previously getting 200 views got 2,000-7,000 views.”
- Still, people report this feature removing actual followers. “Our list of ‘flagged for review’ contains mostly real people, where actual bot accounts are ignored by the tool 🤷 useless feature 😂.”
- But… “Flagged means bots” and “IG literally wants you to delete them… Definitely delete them. Listen to the IG overlords and do what it says.”
- I also read reports that it takes a week to see any change in engagement after doing this.
I was overly cautious because sometimes doing things like this can mess up your algorithm and cause dramatically reduced views. For example, wrongly using the disavow tool in Google Search Console is known to harm rankings a ton.
So, after extensive research, I tried it yesterday.
Here’s what I found:
- Engagement immediately went up… for what feels like all of my videos.
- Instead of 4,900 flagged followers being removed, only 1,100 were removed.
That’s it. Nothing but a good experience so far.
Now I know my case isn’t for everybody. A friend just removed 7,000 flagged followers from his 190,000 follower account and said he hasn’t noticed anything good nor bad.
But personally, I’ve immediately noticed a positive difference and am hoping this will continue (as, again, this was yesterday).
With all that said.
It’s been a good week.
Hope it’s been a good week for you, too.
