Legitimate EMD but penalised?

[addz123]

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.

I'll PM you.

Even if it was Panda, there's no reason both of these sites shouldn't have recovered.

I accept it's impossible for anyone to believe unless they see it.

 

[Retired_Member38]

No problem, but thats the problem when multiple updates are run back together - its near impossible to pull them apart at the time, and its definitely impossible weeks/months later.

 

[murph]

M Cutts stated at the time that the EMD update affected EMD's that were of "low quality".

 

[Retired_Member38]

M Cutts stated at the time that the EMD update affected EMD's that were of "low quality".

Which could mean sites with crap content / low number of links / poor anchor text distribution get their emd boost taken away from them, or dialled down. It still wouldn't mean anyone had been penalised.

 

[murph]

Which could mean sites with crap content / low number of links / poor anchor text distribution get their emd boost taken away from them, or dialled down. It still wouldn't mean anyone had been penalised.

So certain sites get a filter applied which sees their rank for that phrase sent into oblivion... Hmm... penalty?

 

[Retired_Member38]

So certain sites get a filter applied which sees their rank for that phrase sent into oblivion... Hmm... penalty?

No. Anything that sent you into oblivion was nothing at all to do with the emd update.

When the emd update happened, it either affected your site or it didn't. I assume for most affiliate or smaller sites, they probably were affected. So your rankings now drop to somewhere between where they were, and where you would have been had you never built on an exact match domain in the first place.

You were never penalised - you simply lost some/all of the benefit that the exact match domain was giving you over everyone else.

I was reading a bunch of people crying on a web design forum saying they wish they never built their sites on an EMD at all. imo this is a silly viewpoint to take... they benefited from all of these extra rankings up till now, and then Google took away some or all of that benefit. They never penalised them. Had they done everything on a random domain instead, they would still rank in the same positions, but not have enjoyed any of those extra rankings over the last several years.

 

[addz123]

No. Anything that sent you into oblivion was nothing at all to do with the emd update.

When the emd update happened, it either affected your site or it didn't. I assume for most affiliate or smaller sites, they probably were affected. So your rankings now drop to somewhere between where they were, and where you would have been had you never built on an exact match domain in the first place.

You were never penalised - you simply lost some/all of the benefit that the exact match domain was giving you over everyone else.

I was reading a bunch of people crying on a web design forum saying they wish they never built their sites on an EMD at all. imo this is a silly viewpoint to take... they benefited from all of these extra rankings up till now, and then Google took away some or all of that benefit. They never penalised them. Had they done everything on a random domain instead, they would still rank in the same positions, but not have enjoyed any of those extra rankings over the last several years.

Anyone who was hit by the EMD update lost entire rankings across the board for their site and inner pages. If it was just a "dialling down of EMD" then only the homepage would suffer. So that's just wrong.

 

[murph]

No. Anything that sent you into oblivion was nothing at all to do with the emd update.

When the emd update happened, it either affected your site or it didn't. I assume for most affiliate or smaller sites, they probably were affected. So your rankings now drop to somewhere between where they were, and where you would have been had you never built on an exact match domain in the first place.

You were never penalised - you simply lost some/all of the benefit that the exact match domain was giving you over everyone else.

I was reading a bunch of people crying on a web design forum saying they wish they never built their sites on an EMD at all. imo this is a silly viewpoint to take... they benefited from all of these extra rankings up till now, and then Google took away some or all of that benefit. They never penalised them. Had they done everything on a random domain instead, they would still rank in the same positions, but not have enjoyed any of those extra rankings over the last several years.

That's one hell of an assumption? Where are you getting this from? Your own experience or something else? I'd honestly be interested to read more on this if you would care to share any links confirming all this.

 

[cc976a]

I never got hit on any EMD I ran even though they weren't amazing quality - so from my own personal conclusion, EMD penalties didn't happen and really if a site was hit it was due to Panda (which I did suffer from the hands of)

What's to say the EMDs that were hit weren't a combination of an EMD tone down and Panda at the same time - sending the site straight down the oubliette.

None of us have a dataset wide enough to draw the right conclusion.

In reality, G penalises for bad content, but why wouldn't they penalise for a low quality site on an EMD. Personally G would be foolish to penalise a quality site just because they were on an EMD. No logic there.

Haha - anyone would think G may have realised if they penalised those who spent money on a good EMD the owners would need to spend lots of cash on Adwords to even think of making a ROI - haha...

....err maybe we're on to something here

 

[pugyrob]

I think personally that both arguments are correct.

1) I do think there was an EMD update. I think before, you used to get a certain amount of extra benefit of the doubt for having an EMD with loads of EMD links and anchors. The worst thing for example they could do would be to not rank brands for their own name and so forth so they gave you a lot of leeway. I definitely think they dialled this allowance right down and as such it was an EMD update of sorts.

2) However it would make sense that straight after they dialled this allowance right down, they ran a mild form of penguin, panda or both. As such Penguin/Panda were really the things that got you but you no longer had that EMD protection. This looks like an EMD update and i supose it was.

At the time of the "EMD" penalty i had a lot of thin EMD's punished but i also had a few thin sites that were not EMD's punished. This suggests it was more than just an EMD update to me. That said only Google really knows.

 

[Blossom]

I agree with Monkey and Murray. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

Back to the original topic, ask the SEO company what other steps they are willing to take to look at the domain. If not, look at it yourself. Check the backlinks - is there anything obviously spammy? Has someone (even if not the SEO company) built a lot of crappy links to the site? Check GWT for anything that jumps out, and use at least one other backlink checking tool as well. Make a spreadsheet of all the potential bad ones, and contact the site owners and disavow the links in webmaster tools. Remember it could be over-optimisation of anchor text as well as spammy sites, so if it is then try to balance it out. Ask site owners to change anchor text if you need to; if they won't or want paying, disavow the link. Make sure all your on-page stuff is strong too - good, unique, useful content and no linking back to the index page with optimised anchor text from subpages. Detail everything you did in-depth and resubmit to Google. It may take a couple of goes depending on how thorough you are and how many links you have.

 

[Edwin]

Looks like 50% of the argument is around the word "penalty".

If something scored 10 and now scores 5, is that...
A) A 50% smaller bonus (from 0 to 5, not from 0 to 10)
B) A 50% penalty (from 10 to 5)

Two ways of saying the same thing, it just depends on whether you start with the then-situation (then it's a penalty) or look at the glass and the water separately (the glass is the same, there's 50% less water in it, smaller bonus)

If you shove the semantic debate above out of the picture, there's less disagreement than it looks!

 

[martin-s]

According to our tests, undeserving sites had their EMD ranking boost dropped, but deserving sites weren't affected.

For particularly undeserving sites, the loss of bonus may well have been enough to drop out of the top 100 sites, but that's just because the bonus was unreasonably strong..

 

[murph]

I respect all points made here, however, it stands that G applied a negative effect on selected EMD websites according to quality. Dialled down boosts or - x penalties... Only G has the answer. Anyway, apologies to OP for tangent discussion in his thread!

 

[Blossom]

According to our tests, undeserving sites had their EMD ranking boost dropped, but deserving sites weren't affected.

How do you know that it wasn't just that undeserving sites dropped rankings and deserving sites weren't affected? Not sure how you can objectively prove that EMD was the factor when every site presumably had different links, content etc. etc. etc.

 

[Dextron]

Hi Blossom, regarding this point 'no linking back to the index page with optimised anchor text from subpages' - is this a big no-no then? (I'm trying to shake a few penalties myself!)

Cheers

Paul

 

[Murray]

If you shove the semantic debate above out of the picture, there's less disagreement than it looks!

There is a big difference between penalty or not penalty. I don't believe google class algorithms as penalties all though some act penalty like. Here are my thoughts..

To have a penalty you actually have to something good being penalised to be able to recover it.

If you drop because all your links are spam, what can your recover? you can't get value back from the spam.

If you dropped because your rankings were high just because you had an EMD, what can you recover? google would have to roll back their algorithm.. so you could never "recover" that, but you could start to get it ranking again off merit.

On the flip side

Something like panda, you could have wonderful quality links and some great content but your site might also contain a lot of duplicate content which would make the whole site get hit.. but by removing/rewriting and changing whatever caused you to get flagged by panda, you could recover the good.

There are more examples but you get what I mean.

 

[Blossom]

Hi Blossom, regarding this point 'no linking back to the index page with optimised anchor text from subpages' - is this a big no-no then? (I'm trying to shake a few penalties myself!)

Cheers

Paul

Hi Paul,

Huge no-no. I've seen it cause instant penalties.

Even without causing penalties it won't do you any favours - only the first anchor text for a given URL on a page gets counted, and most likely it will be your logo or a 'Home' link in your top/left nav for your index page, not a body content link.

 

[Dextron]

Thanks for that Blossom - much appreciated! Looks like I've got a lot of changes to make then.....!