emd google updates

Google's EMD Algo Update - Early Data Recently, I wrote about changes we’ve been tracking in how Google treats Exact-Match Domains (EMDs). Yesterday (Friday, 9/28), Matt Cutts tweeted the following message:

It was initially unclear what “upcoming” meant and whether the change was in progress or would roll out later in the weekend. Matt went on to say that the change “affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree,” but didn’t pin down the timeline. This morning, our new MozCast "Top-View" metrics showed the following:

We measured a 24-hour drop in EMD influence from 3.58% to 3.21%. This represents a dayover-day change of 10.3%. While the graph only shows the 30-day view, this also marks the lowest measurement of EMD influence on record since we started collecting data in early April.

So, Who Got Hit? Across our data set of 1000 SERPs, 41 EMDs fell out of the Top 10 (5 new EMDs entered, so the net change was 36 domains). Please note that we can’t prove that a domain lost ranking due to the algorithm change – we can only measure what fell out. Here are 5 examples of

domains that lost ranking as of this morning (9/29) – all had previously ranked for at least the past 7 days:     

www.bmicalculatormale.com (#4) www.charterschools.org (#7) playscrabble.net (#3) www.purses.org (#3) www.teethwhitening.com (#4)

The parenthetical value shows the EMDs ranking on 9/28 (the day before the drop). Again, all we know is that these domains fell out of the rankings for their exact-match phrases as of this morning – I’m not making any statements about the quality of the domains as a whole.

As you can see, the affected domains cover a range of phrase length and TLDs (including .com’s).

There’s no clear pattern in the size of the drop – some fell out of the top 100 entirely, while others slipped a couple of pages. For example, www.charterschools.org fell from #7 to #23, whereas playscrabble.net dropped from #3 down 18 pages to #183.

What About The #1s?

You may have noticed that none of my example domains were previously ranked in the #1 spot. Across the 41 EMDs that dropped out of the top 10 in our data, none of them ranked #1 the previous day. Three domains held the #2 spot prior to their fall, including www.mariogamesonline.net, which is no longer in the top 100. It’s interesting to note that, of the 41 EMDs affected, 5 of them had “games” in their domain name, but this could just be a fluke (or a sign of an industry with too many low-value sites).

What’s The Pattern?

It’s not my goal to call these sites out – some may have dropped in ranking due to factors that had nothing to do with this algorithm update (and were only coincidentally EMDs). For example, www.charterschools.org appears to be a legitimate site representing a professional organization: the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA). At first glance, it appears that their only crime may be choosing a keyword-focused domain over their own brand. The site doesn’t really target the phrase “charter schools” particularly strongly and is tied to one state. It’s not a bad site, but one can argue whether it deserves to rank in the top 10 for a competitive keyword simply because of its domain name.

Other sites in the mix do appear to exhibit more traditional low-quality signals – aggressive keyword usage, low-authority, spammy link-building, etc. – and seem to have been ranking solely by virtue of their EMDs. There’s no one clear signal in play, though – at this point, we have to assume that Google is weighing multiple factors. Again, it is interesting to note that no EMDs previously at #1 were affected, but our data set is still relatively small.

If you have specific questions about the data, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I’ll do my best to follow up. These patterns are surprisingly complex, and I wanted to dig in for a quick first look while the data was still fresh.

Late Friday afternoon, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, dropped a bomb on some webmasters and SEOs. He announced on Twitter that Google is going after "low quality" exact match domains (EMD) to ensure they do not rank well in the Google search results. Matt said this algorithm update only impacts 0.6% of English-US queries.

Honestly, I am a bit surprised it took Google so long to do this. I mean, Matt said publicly that Google will look into exact match domains almost two years ago. I would have thought Google would have done something shortly after. Maybe they have and maybe this is just an update to that? I am not sure. But this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone going after the exact match domains.

I believe Google was slowing pushing this out a few days ago, on Thursday night. I saw an uptick in SEO chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread but I really didn't think it was Panda or Penguin related, which it wasn't, so I decided to wait it out and see what I could find out over the weekend. It was this, an exact match domain algorithm change.

It seems like many sites were hit, as many webmasters have reported being hurt by this update. A WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters claiming to be victims. Latest Google EMD Algo update on 28th Sep 2012 has taken everyone by Storm. I will do a poll on this in about a week, I don't want to poll our readers until they have time to investigate if they were impacted by this. But it seems pretty significant, especially for SEOs and domainers.

SEOmoz has some early data on who was hit and how many sites were impacted. They say it seems like a pretty big update and shared this chart via mozcast: Anyway, this is a special weekend report - I rarely do this but hey, I am offline Monday and Tuesday.

He tweeted again the next day‌..

RESOURCES: http://www.seomoz.org/ http://www.seroundtable.com/