Google update... going after EMD's

[chippyb]

Anyone explain why this is second for "short term loans": bestshorttermloansnow.co.uk

It is 6 days old, has 3 pages of content and 72 backlinks. That position is worth $xx,xxx/mo...

What about the one above it ukshorttermloansnow

 

[Ashton]

What about the one above it ukshorttermloansnow

Yep, again another prime example. Its just fucked. These didnt exist. I have been #1 for that term for the past month, I have blog articles of decent quality, I follow googles guidelines in clearly displaying APR etc, I have even been approved by googles search quality team after they asked me various questions regarding the business.

I just don't get it. Ahrefs shows no 301s, they are crap sites. They do NOT belong.

 

[lethal0r]

ok so attempting to be positive... I have NEVER seen an update be completed inside 3 days. it has always taken a week or more for things to settle down. theres movement yet in this update.

has anyone experienced otherwise in the past?

 

[Marcoose]

ok so attempting to be positive... I have NEVER seen an update be completed inside 3 days. it has always taken a week or more for things to settle down. theres movement yet in this update.

has anyone experienced otherwise in the past?

Do you play on PKR?

 

[davedevelopment]

My sites have been hit, though I'm not really surprised, I don't put much effort in to them. What seems to be rubbish though is the sites that have been left ranking much higher than mine, which are far, far worse than my meager efforts. Oh well.

 

[bensd]

Interesting thought by Lee Owen (will the name be starred out?!) on twitter last night:

Just figured out why google dropped some EMDs. Exact match domains steal money from adword spend, they want adwords to still be best chance.

I can't decided if I agree with this or not. I appreciate EMDs may have a better click through rate, but google seems to have moved brands further up the search engine - aren't users likely to click on a brand name than someone they haven't heard of using adwords?

 

[Aegean]

google seems to have moved brands further up the search engine - aren't users likely to click on a brand name than someone they haven't heard of using adwords?

I think they're more likely to click on the highest result that is relevant to their search, taking the content of the title and description into account, although I suppose some may go directly to a familiar brand if its visible.

 

[lethal0r]

Do you play on PKR?

I do, but please explain!

 

[boxfish]

I think there are a lot of bad results in the serps but I'm sure the changes G are trying to make are based on the viewing habits of their traffic.

I read this the other day http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-hidden-benefit-of-authorship-134526

It shows how Google can tell how a visitor views a site, if they are recognised to have liked it/consumed it then they are offered more of the same, if not they are not.

With G+ accounts and more specifically Chrome having massive success they now must have masses of data of how visitors view things and can determine the patterns between something they found useful and something they didn't.

I know a lot of people say 'my site had good content' but how good is it really?

Do real people stay and read?
Do they leave comments?
Do they send a message through the contact form?
Do they tweet the link to their 000's of legitimate followers?

It's ok having correctly composed, grammatically correct content, but if it's not receiving any legitimate interest then I'm sure Google can tell straight away.

I know as a reader I can tell instantly whether content was written to provoke/interact/inform or just written for the sake of adding content to a site. So many times I come across EMDs with articles like 'The History of the Slow Cooker' or 'What is a Camping tent?'

I think with the way EMDs have worked in the past, and the fact they have not needed to provide top quality content, very few people have actually provided it and now they are paying for it.

 

[addz123]

I think there are a lot of bad results in the serps but I'm sure the changes G are trying to make are based on the viewing habits of their traffic.

I read this the other day http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-hidden-benefit-of-authorship-134526

It shows how Google can tell how a visitor views a site, if they are recognised to have liked it/consumed it then they are offered more of the same, if not they are not.

With G+ accounts and more specifically Chrome having massive success they now must have masses of data of how visitors view things and can determine the patterns between something they found useful and something they didn't.

I know a lot of people say 'my site had good content' but how good is it really?

Do real people stay and read?
Do they leave comments?
Do they send a message through the contact form?
Do they tweet the link to their 000's of legitimate followers?

It's ok having correctly composed, grammatically correct content, but if it's not receiving any legitimate interest then I'm sure Google can tell straight away.

I know as a reader I can tell instantly whether content was written to provoke/interact/inform or just written for the sake of adding content to a site. So many times I come across EMDs with articles like 'The History of the Slow Cooker' or 'What is a Camping tent?'

I think with the way EMDs have worked in the past, and the fact they have not needed to provide top quality content, very few people have actually provided it and now they are paying for it.

Sigh, again I think this is irrelevant because too many high quality sites have been hit.

Two of my own were hit, one with 3.30 minutes average on site, the other with 2.30 minutes.

You saw the pregnancy site that was hit, which again has great user metrics.

Meanwhile a few of my shitty 1 yr+ 20 page affiliate sites which havn't been updated in over a 1 are still ranking no.1.

These are both good reads:

http://www.inbound.co.uk/blog/googles-collateral-update

http://www.seounique.com/blog/google-exact-match-domain-emd-penalty-first-look/

The fact is I don't think Google can give site-wide penalties to newish sites that happen to be using EMDs because that severs any chance of a successful white hat campaign or users finding them in the SERPs to collect CTR% data on them.

 

[cc976a]

I'm seeing my inner pages and YouTube video ranking for my main keyword (albeit pages 5-19) but home page - which was towards the top - disappeared. The keyword it is trying to target is a PMD. For the EMD keyword (still with around 1,000 exacts) it's still ranking top spot.

It's an 18 month year old domain and site.

For my main keyword there are now 5 US sites and 1 Australian (which will be of no use to the visitors searching this keyword). So this algo change now means 60% of the Top 10 are worthless.

I'm finding the older the domain the less impact. I have one new .org.uk site on an old domain that's not budged (same industry and local exacts as example above) - and a real crappy 2 year old affiliate site for Amazon that is really poor not budged either.

Just frustrating not more understanding of this algo change coming out, as it's not just EMD's as Cutts said.

Knew opening up my site to Analytics was a mistake (!!). Co-incidentally my sites that have dropped had Analytics installed. The ones that didn't have stayed where they are.

Anyone else see this?

 

[dashu1]

I think what's clear is that they haven't just "turned down" the value of an EMD but have in fact applied a penalty to them if they meet some criteria or other.

 

[inbound]

What seems to be rubbish though is the sites that have been left ranking much higher than mine, which are far, far worse than my meager efforts. Oh well.

To add a little humour to a dark time for many...

The definition of SPAM (web spam as opposed to email spam) is:

Sites
Poitioned
Above
Mine

 

[xstu74]

I 301'd a hit EMD site a couple of days ago so ill update at some point.
But as i believe there was a penguin / panda inclusion in this update, with the number of non EMD's hit, im not sure wether this will work on a long term basis, but worth a punt.
I surea small amount of hit sites will bounce back so wouldnt want to make an rash decisions at this point best see what developes over the next couple of weeks.

All my EMD sites that sank were new sites with recent backlinking, All my EMD's from Pre penguin that have zero linking done since April have stuck or moved up.

Actually this is the weird thing with Google, you might think they'd do that, but actually they seem to reward it.

I can't give specifics, so ignore if you like, which I probably would on a public forum, but the last 2 updates we've actually told them the specifics of what certain people are doing, and both times they've punished them.

And in one of those cases specifically used those specific UrLs as the examples in the "here's what we've done explanation".

The April update is a good example.

However, this time while there's some punishing of bad stuff, they seem to have widened it out to everyone, and it seems to make no sense at all.

Some of the "bad dudes" we'd told them about in April are doing the 301's to other sites of theirs, in fact they just swap the 301s from one site, to another, to another, and each time their new site appears - as is the case now with another one - so I am not convinced that 301ing an EMD that now won't rank onto a non-EMD with the old site on it won't do the trick.

It needs trying and the results posting.

I'm all for Google having better results, but this is taking the biscuit.

 

[dashu1]

I 301'd a hit EMD site a couple of days ago so ill update at some point.
But as i believe there was a penguin / panda inclusion in this update, with the number of non EMD's hit, im not sure wether this will work on a long term basis, but worth a punt.
I surea small amount of hit sites will bounce back so wouldnt want to make an rash decisions at this point best see what developes over the next couple of weeks.

All my EMD sites that sank were new sites with recent backlinking, All my EMD's from Pre penguin that have zero linking done since April have stuck or moved up.

No I agree it's best to wait rather than doing anything rash.

I've done a reinclusion request for one of mine because I genuinely do think it's high quality and don't think it deserved to be hit.

If that doesn't work, which I think it won't, then I'm going to move the site to a non EMD as well.

 

[js1]

Did a UK search today for the term builders spotted a EMD on the near top of page one of big G that was never there before???


Searched handyman nottingham last week and again today (as the .co.uk was dropping today) different serps the first four results now shown emds???

Seen a few other results that don’t seem to make sense given the latest update.

 

[xstu74]

I think its fair to assume this update hasnt got as smoothly as G hoped so id expect there to be a refresh at some point wihin the next week or so

Did a UK search today for the term builders spotted a EMD on the near top of page one of big G that was never there before???


Searched handyman nottingham last week and again today (as the .co.uk was dropping today) different serps the first four results now shown emds???

Seen a few other results that don’t seem to make sense given the latest update.

 

[Ashton]

Did a UK search today for the term builders spotted a EMD on the near top of page one of big G that was never there before???


Searched handyman nottingham last week and again today (as the .co.uk was dropping today) different serps the first four results now shown emds???

Seen a few other results that don’t seem to make sense given the latest update.

Woah that builders.com site is such high quality! Gosh.

 

[lethal0r]

my rankings are back for everything now hows everyone else?

i wouldn't be surprised to see more movement though!

 

[xstu74]

my rankings are back for everything now hows everyone else?

i wouldn't be surprised to see more movement though!

Just seeing some keywords bouncing back for my 2X EMD'S site, DAM I 301'd one site!! ahhhhhhhh lol

(UPDATE: Keywords in and out of search, so some things go on wether a partial roll back)