Despite the cries of pain from some publishers over the Panda and Penguin changes to the Google algorithm, the search giant continues to make changes to their algorithm that could have a huge impact on publishers. A recent tweet from Matt Cutts warns that Google will ‘reduce low quality “exact-match” domains in search results’.
Previously a great way to get good results in searches for, say, FPGA development tools was to buy the domain fpga-development-tools.com. In the future this technique is likely to be less effective. So this change is going to make companies setting up “issue” or “topic” microsites work a little harder. Whether it has any impact on mainstream publishers remains to be seen.
Search Engine Watch does a great job of analysing this change.