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Legitimate EMD but penalised?

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They merely turned down the benefit that exact matches get - they didn't penalise anything. So to call anything an "emd penalty" is pretty unhelpful, as its not even close to what actually happened.

This was also a while back now - if the OP's client has been penalised recently, then it is clearly nothing to do with that update. If it was when that update happened, then both the OP and the seo company are failing to understand they haven't been penalised at all. An algorithm has just been tweaked to give exact match domains less benefit.

Agreed, they've turned down the EMD bonus, but that infamous "EMD" update did apply penalties to domains that tripped whatever filters they used... and it focused solely on EMDs. Call it what you like!
 
They merely turned down the benefit that exact matches get - they didn't penalise anything. So to call anything an "emd penalty" is pretty unhelpful, as its not even close to what actually happened.

This was also a while back now - if the OP's client has been penalised recently, then it is clearly nothing to do with that update. If it was when that update happened, then both the OP and the seo company are failing to understand they haven't been penalised at all. An algorithm has just been tweaked to give exact match domains less benefit.

You're wrong Monkey. 100% wrong.
 
You're wrong Monkey. 100% wrong.

What he said sounds right to me.

More of a advantage being taken away rather than anyone being punished just because of their domain name.

Think about it logically, if you were to make your own search engine would you automatically punish anyone with an EMD domain just because? of course not.
 
You're wrong Monkey. 100% wrong.

And here lies the problem of asking for (or listening to) free seo advice on a forum. Either I'm talking rubbish, or you are - we clearly can't both be right. But its hard to know who to listen to, and who not to :)

So if you're confident the seo company know what to do, I'd listen to them - you have paid them to deal with exactly this after all. Or if you can't trust their opinion, then why are you paying them? Get rid of them and get someone qualified in to do the job.
 
And here lies the problem of asking for (or listening to) free seo advice on a forum. Either I'm talking rubbish, or you are - we clearly can't both be right. But its hard to know who to listen to, and who not to :)

So if you're confident the seo company know what to do, I'd listen to them - you have paid them to deal with exactly this after all. Or if you can't trust their opinion, then why are you paying them? Get rid of them and get someone qualified in to do the job.

I wish people would stop speculating on algorithm changes.

I have proof, in addition to people on my Skype, that the EMD update filtered out sites completely from the SERPs, just like Penguin. If it was a "toning" down of EMD value then the homepage would drop a page or two, the entire site wouldn't just disappear from the SERPs completely. There was also a lot of collateral in this update, so know it wasn't just about quality content either.
 
What he said sounds right to me.

More of a advantage being taken away rather than anyone being punished just because of their domain name.

Think about it logically, if you were to make your own search engine would you automatically punish anyone with an EMD domain just because? of course not.

It wasn't an automatic penalty for just having an EMD, rather they scrutinised EMDs and applied their update to them. Penalties were dished out. You try telling the domain owners who completely vanished for their EMD phrases?!
 
I wish people would stop speculating on algorithm changes.

I have proof, in addition to people on my Skype, that the EMD update filtered out sites completely from the SERPs, just like Penguin. If it was a "toning" down of EMD value then the homepage would drop a page or two, the entire site wouldn't just disappear from the SERPs completely. There was also a lot of collateral in this update, so know it wasn't just about quality content either.

It was rolled out about the same time as panda.
 
There were other updates around the same time - you could easily get hit with something else, then turn around and blame it on the phantom 'exact match penalty'. Google deliberately roll out changes close together, to prevent people doing exactly what we're doing right now - trying to work out what caused things.

An exact match penalty makes no sense at all. For all of my old and untouched exact matches, they either stayed where they were or dropped a little. None were 'penalised'.
 
It was rolled out about the same time as panda.

More concise version of what I was writing, so you got it in first :D

Its exactly this - two updates rolled out at once. Get whacked by Panda, blame the EMD thing.

I'm not saying anyone here is doing this, but I bet a lot of seo's preferred to blame the domain name than Panda when their customers came crying. If they get hit with Panda then the client will blame the seo... if the seo palms the blame off onto an 'emd update' then the fault is nobodies, as the domain was chosen long before he arrived.
 
There were other updates around the same time - you could easily get hit with something else, then turn around and blame it on the phantom 'exact match penalty'. Google deliberately roll out changes close together, to prevent people doing exactly what we're doing right now - trying to work out what caused things.

An exact match penalty makes no sense at all. For all of my old and untouched exact matches, they either stayed where they were or dropped a little. None were 'penalised'.

Who said it had to make sense? Ask anyone in the SEO industry and they'll tell you the amount of collateral in that update.

I had shit, low quality EMD sites untouched by the EMD update, yet my high quality sites with 3+ mins on site was wiped out by it.

Also, Panda usually reduces traffic by 50%, not 90%, and the Panda update occurred 24 hours earlier when my site hadn't been affected. It was more of an age/authority EMD update then about quality.

If you disagree with me, fine, but stop spreading ideas that it's a phantom update.

Also, from what I saw the EMD update only hurt newish sites less than 6 months. Any EMDs over 12 months old didn't get affected.
 
I'm with monkey and Murray on this.

Spent a lot of time looking at emds and penalties and have never seen an emd die purely because it is an emd. There are always links/anchor ratios involved when a site dies.

My opinion is that if anything google dialled up the anchor text to penalty ratio when assessing emds so its easier to get emds penalised than a non emd name.
 
My sites didn't have any exact match anchors when that update happened, purely natural brand links.

It doesn't matter how much time you spend looking at EMDs and penalties, that update only happened the once and there haven't been any refreshes to date.
 
I'm with monkey and Murray on this.

Spent a lot of time looking at emds and penalties and have never seen an emd die purely because it is an emd. There are always links/anchor ratios involved when a site dies.

My opinion is that if anything google dialled up the anchor text to penalty ratio when assessing emds so its easier to get emds penalised than a non emd name.

Yes, the EMD update applied the over optimisation filters etc on EMDs! No one is saying they got a penalty just for being an EMD?
 
Yes, the EMD update applied the over optimisation filters etc on EMDs! No one is saying they got a penalty just for being an EMD?

This is also wrong. It didn't apply over optimisation filters to anyone. It applied a general dampening of the exact match boost to everyone.

This was then deliberately rolled out at the same time as another update, which is a favoured Google tactic to make it hard to see why things changed around.
 
Also, Panda usually reduces traffic by 50%, not 90%, and the Panda update occurred 24 hours earlier when my site hadn't been affected. It was more of an age/authority EMD update then about quality.

This is a tough thing to generalise.

A site might get 90% of it's traffic from one or two keywords, so if they drop off that is 90% gone.

Also, from what I saw the EMD update only hurt newish sites less than 6 months. Any EMDs over 12 months old didn't get affected.

it could be speculated that EMDs over the previous few months had already been getting knocked off due to panda and penguin..

The older EMDs that got through would more likely actually have a bit of quality about them and deserved to rank.

You could imagine the above creating a scenario where newer sites seemed to be bearing the brunt.
 
This is also wrong. It didn't apply over optimisation filters to anyone. It applied a general dampening of the exact match boost to everyone.

This was then deliberately rolled out at the same time as another update, which is a favoured Google tactic to make it hard to see why things changed around.

Why do you bother speculating? I have proof that I was hit by the EMD update on 2 sites of high quality, high time on site, overnight with natural backlinks, not occurring on the day of the Panda update. What both of these sites had in common was that they were very new (around 3-5 months old) and lacked any real authority.

They have since built up authority with more great content but have not recovered as the EMD filter hasn't been refreshed yet.

You may as well be arguing that Penguin doesn't exist and that it's just Panda.
 
This is a tough thing to generalise.

A site might get 90% of it's traffic from one or two keywords, so if they drop off that is 90% gone.

None of my site's original SEO traffic came from the EMD to begin with, I wasn't even targeting the term.

it could be speculated that EMDs over the previous few months had already been getting knocked off due to panda and penguin..

The older EMDs that got through would more likely actually have a bit of quality about them and deserved to rank.

You could imagine the above creating a scenario where newer sites seemed to be bearing the brunt.

What does age have to do with quality?
 
Feel free to post the proof, I'm open to being convinced otherwise but at this point I'm 99% certain that you are wrong. And comments about 12+ month old emd's and Panda usually hitting traffic by 50%, are not doing much to convince me that you're going to prove me wrong here.
 
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