Thread: September 2012 - The Death of EMDs :(

Fuck 'em

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/251784203597910016

3 of my best earning sites just tanked... heck... one wasn't even on an EMD. I'm crushed... need a drink

Added: make that 4 sites!

The common thread with these sites:

They were all thin sites with 5-10 pages of content and they were static type sites utilizing pages instead of posts! I used Wordpress on all of them! Domains are all less then a year old!

That's the only common factors I can see, for now!

Mine are fine so far

Got one that hit the bricks a few hours ago. ...

The worst are the douches who twitter him back

This bitch of an update is still rolling out so who knows how catostrophic it is going to be...

Misery was looking for company and I found some here: Algo Change Targets Low Quality Exact Match Domains: Weather Report Friday 9-28-2012 Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld

Had one domain move down 1 spot. I'll keep an eye on things for sure....

A few other factors about these sites: none of them have any sort of social presence or social backlinks. The main type of backlinks I build are link pyramids with unique content on the first tier (web 2s) and spun articles on the 2nd tier using web 2.0s and Wikis. Coupled with that I use high PR blog comments.

All content is unique and the home pages all have articles that are 1500+ words with a resource section linking out to related authority sites. There is good internal linking on these sites as well. All monetized with Adsense (Hhmmm)

I think this update is all about thin sites regardless of the quality of the content! But who knows... will have to wait for others to chime in!

That sucks man. When the money makers move down it can take your breath away for sure. I have a thin (5 page) emd.net that is doing fine still. No adsense though it's an affiliate site. That's my only EMD as I usually prefer to create a site with a brand.

I had several sites that dropped 70-90 places for each keyword.

All of these sites had a keyword in the url in it but were thin with 5 pages or so but lots of posts.

the way I have them setup is

blahblahkeyword.com and then /keyword1, keyword2, etc.

If you think about it, Google should rank #1 only brand name EMDs. If "dog training" is not a brand name, then dogtraining.com should not rank high. But if you search for a brand name related query (like cuisinart coffeemaker), of course the official website of Cuisinart must be #1, even if other sites have much more backlinks.

The challenge here is to identify brand names and regular words.