I was just going through some old work files and came across some research I did in 2010 and 2011 but completely forgot about until now. It was a fairly straightforward analysis of the occurrence of keywords in domains, sub-domains and URL paths in Google’s top 100 results for the term [broadband].

Given the effects of the dreaded EMD update, I thought it would be interesting to run this again in light of Google’s changes. The results were pretty interesting:

Clearly this is anecdotal research (and misses out data from Jan 2012), but it is interesting to see the huge drop in domain matches (far more than I expected), and the continuing rise of keyword use in the standard URL path.

If you’re interested in trying this out for yourself on some select keywords, if you’re technically savvy you can use my Github gist or if not, you can use an online version of the EMD analysis tool.