Thread: September 2012 - The Death of EMDs :(

The comments on the following searchengineland article are interesting:

Google Issues "Weather Report" Of Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match Domains

Some people who have personal sites with their names are not ranking for those names! because the new algo thinks it's an exact match keyword domain for their name! However other people are ranking for their names with named domains - I wonder if studying why will give us a peek into G's branding algo?

Apparently, viagra.com doesn't rank for viagra anymore - I just checked, and it's at #5 below wikipedia and two compromised sites!

Originally Posted by Daisy

The comments on the following searchengineland article are interesting:

Google Issues "Weather Report" Of Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match Domains

Some people who have personal sites with their names are not ranking for those names! because the new algo thinks it's an exact match keyword domain for their name! However other people are ranking for their names with named domains - I wonder if studying why will give us a peek into G's branding algo?

Apparently, viagra.com doesn't rank for viagra anymore - I just checked, and it's at #5 below wikipedia and two compromised sites!

It really should rank #1, it is a brand name!

If I am searching for Zanussi dishwasher, I would like to visit the official Zanussi website first and foremost, not a lame affiliate or ecommerce site.

To be honest, a lot of webmasters used EMDs for spam. For the search term "Facebook like button", facebooklikebutton.co ranked #2 and now they are gone.

Originally Posted by theblindrat

Good find by you and Daisy. I had a 50 article extremely well written reviews site with some posts having 100+ comments get DESTROYED.. it has a dash in the domain name.

Some of my sites were hit and none has a dash at all, not a single one, but your post lead me to another trail: Did your review site have the word "review(s)" in the domain name. I have quite a few review style sites, all relatively thin (3-10 pages), but the only ones hit by this update have "review", "buy", "cheap", "deals" or a popular brand name ("brand""model/number".com) in the domain name. Out of all others, only a few sporadic hits, although many of them are very similar in size and style.

It looks a bit like certain words are more toxic in the domain name than others. Anyone sharing this experience?

Originally Posted by mex-deluxe

If I am searching for Zanussi dishwasher, I would like to visit the official Zanussi website first and foremost, not a lame affiliate or ecommerce site.

Absolutely no. If someone else is offering more or better information, more value for visitors it should outrank the official site. Rankings should be as unbiased as possible in my opinion, bad enough that Google gives so much trust to brands.

Extreme example: Imagine the site of the iranian government ranking #1 for a "iran" search in the US, spreading their propaganda in english, just because it's their "brand", the original Iran website.

Originally Posted by StarkReality

Some of my sites were hit and none has a dash at all, not a single one, but your post lead me to another trail: Did your review site have the word "review(s)" in the domain name. I have quite a few review style sites, all relatively thin (3-10 pages), but the only ones hit by this update have "review", "buy", "cheap", "deals" or a popular brand name ("brand""model/number".com) in the domain name. Out of all others, only a few sporadic hits, although many of them are very similar in size and style.

sure do and only a 4 page site and it ranks #2,#3,#4 and #5 for different page of the site ! also only direct blasts to it !

I don't use dashes at all for any of my domains and a lot of them got dinged. I can replicate them all and re-rank them, but honestly, this one was a PITA. It's almost as if they made this one for me, haha.

I've been checking the number of indexed pages for those domains that got whacked and most of them have low amounts of content, except for some of my bigger sites that have 30-50 pages of stuff and they got affected as well. Then I have some 1 pagers that are still good to go.

Originally Posted by fandango

...It's almost as if they made this one for me, haha.

I can totally relate with you on this!

Quick question for anyone who lost some sites, are any of you using GWT or GA?

Originally Posted by StarkReality

Extreme example: Imagine the site of the iranian government ranking #1 for a "iran" search in the US, spreading their propaganda in english, just because it's their "brand", the original Iran website.

I wanted to comment on this, but I guess politics is not allowed here

I'm using GWT and GA but not on all of them, just a few that were hit.