On Sept. 28th Google’s Matt Cutts to announce a “minor weather report” designed to reduce rank for low quality exact match domains (EMDs), later claiming it would only effect .6% of English US queries. As has been typical recently, there’s a lot more to this story.
In April of this year, Google launched a Panda update on the 19th, a Penguin update on the 24th, and another Panda update on the 27th (timeline ). In addition, other dials were turned during this period to increase rank for authority sites and tighten filters for anchor text over-optimization. Previously, Google had been updating Panda on a monthly basis. But more recently, updates and algorithm changes have been packed together, often with misleading announcements. This so-called was no exception.
Update Codename: Misdirection
On most popular SEO blogs and forums, people tend to attach themselves to whatever Matt Cutts announces, making it easy for Google to point right, throw a cookie in that direction, but then run left…while everyone is still looking the wrong way and missing the real story. Look a bit deeper into the or , and you’ll find a few people yelling…but that’s not what happened to my site. These comments are usually followed by others who have taken Google’s bait, continuing the misdirection.
While there may have been an update that targeted “low quality” EMDs, there definitely was a massive across-the-board penalty that hit non-EMDs. Here’s proof:
EMD Update Hitting Non-EMD Sites
Both of the above sites were long time small businesses in an e-commerce niche I follow, neither with EMDs. (The screenshot is from Advanced Web Ranking. The numbers on the left side of the columns are current rank. The numbers on the right side are the positions lost or gained. The change shown is between Sept. 27 and Oct. 1.) Here’s another screenshot from an entirely different, non-commercial niche:
Codename: Misdirection
Again, neither of the above sites was an EMD and both have been around for nearly a decade. I could post screenshot after screenshot, but they’d all look the same.
Speculation
This update, or something released around the same time, looks more like a Panda or Penguin style devaluation, and it clearly affected far more than .6% of queries. Every query I track, and I track a lot of them, had sites that range from slightly devalued to decimated across-the-board. It’s impossible to come to any definitive conclusions at this point in time, but to me this looks slightly more content related than link related.
Do you have a non-EMD site that was hit by the EMD update? If so, let me know in the comments, along with any thoughts on the cause of the hit. I’ll update this post or post again as soon as I have more information.
We got hit with the EMD update. Not overly sure what the reasons are as we’ve not done much SEO at all. Based on hardly any inbound links and no spammy SEO I’d have expected devaluation in this update, but not to be actively penalised down to 900th place.
The site does use eBay listings on some pages which are accompanied by buying guides and our own sales statistics including recent selling prices etc… They’re useful pages but I think the presence of eBay is enough to have the site labelled as spammy. No real content is used from eBay, just items name and prices.
Do you think noindexing the pages with eBay on them, and creating new guide pages with no ads will be enough to warrant a reinclusion request?
If it’s algorithmic (and we have every reason to think that it is), then I don’t think a reinclusion request will help, unfortunately. As far as I know, reinclusion requests really only help for manual penalties, unless you’re a big brand with PR machinery.
Taking a quick look at your site, it’s probably the type of site Google is looking to get rid of, IMO. You do have “buying guides”, but MOST of the main content area of your site is taken up by affiliate links. So yeah, I do think that’s a problem.
Also, I don’t think adding the * is going to help you get out of this at all. That’s not going to change your domain name, main content, or link profile. It just looks rather strange.
Just being facetious with the asterisks, it’s not some bizarre SEO strategy…
Yep, I agree with you that Google don’t want all the affiliate links in, which is why I’m going to try to noindex those pages. And set the site up more as a blog. Get the blog postings in the content area on the homepage. Take the focus away from the commercial side and approach it more from an informational angle. The soon-to-be noindexed auction pages will remain but won’t be the main focus of the site and will be less prominently linked to.
As much as it’s something Google doesn’t like, users do bookmark these pages, and there are plenty of repeat visits. If it was that terrible people wouldn’t come back right? It would just be catching high percentages of new visitors. As a revenue making site the general model isn’t bad so if I can save it then it’s worth the effort.
However, it defintely isn’t a sustainable long term model…
I think that’s a good strategy.
As you probably know, it doesn’t matter what’s good for users. That’s a line parroted by people who are drinking the Google/white hat cool-aide. What matters is giving Google what they want. Ideally you can give your users AND Google what they want simultaneously. But in some cases if you want to rank, you really do have to lower the value of your site…sad as that may be.
Late Friday one of my sites got nuked. Had a 1-word domain, but the word had no volume and was non commercial. The site is 10 years old and has earned hundreds of natural links from schools and local authority council websites. No dodgy links, in fact no active link buoilding at all, and quality content (although the site didn’t exactly look incredibly well updated or fresh) – anyway hundreds of keywords are now nowhere to be seen. I think this is the usual smoke and mirrors from Google, releasing multiple changes at once to make it impossible to figure it out.
Sorry to hear it Luke. I know the feeling!
And yeah, it is the usual smoke and mirrors of course.
We also got nuked. Non EMD jewellery ecommerce site that we’ve spent the last 18 months building. Nearly 300 products and more than 50 categories, most of which (80%+) was all unique content created by us including lots of the product photos.
Out of about 100 terms I tracked that we were ranking on page 1, we are still only ranking for 3, with the rest all being page 5 or more. When I look more closely, the pages that are now ranking are not the pages that were ranking previously e.g. for the term “Hultquist”, the category page that was ranking is nowhere and our page that’s now ranking at 192 for that term is a product page.
What’s even more frustrating is that the sites that have replaced us are typically lower quality that don’t have the same levels of content, e.g. searching for “Danon Jewellery”, (where we’ve gone from 2 to 10) one result is a news page with no mention of Danon anywhere, one is a site that no longer sells Danon etc etc etc.
I’ve no idea why we got penalised whilst so many others were promoted and I don’t really know whether to continue with site or just start again with a new domain…
@ David: Your site fits the profile of sites I’ve been seeing that get hit by Panda, which is small business e-commerce sites with a similar structure to yours. While your product pages do look to have unique text, it’s not a LOT of text. So when all your product pages are compared, the % of unique content is probably relatively low compared to all the code for each page. There could be more at work than that. But I think the days of making money with an e-commerce site like yours are limited. Or, you need a lot of luck to make it…or high enough margins to make money via PPC instead of SEO.
Possibly, if you had more unique content (guides, etc.) that were REALLY useful and attracted lots of attention and links + a large following of devoted fans, you could survive. But I wouldn’t expect to make it with the model you have now, even if your site was the best among your competition.
Both my blogs were hit very hard on Sept 29. Traffic to my energy blog (energy.typepad.com) has dropped to nearly zero, and most of the keywords it ranked well for (including the name) now aren’t even in the first few pages.
My personal blog (michaelcorder.com) is “technically” an EMD, but it is my own name, and has ranked well for two years. Now it, and all of it’s content cannot even be found in the serps, albeit the pages still show up as indexed.
I am quite flummoxed.