Thread: September 2012 - The Death of EMDs :(

@Smoke

How's the competition for the KWs you are targeting coz my sites that are still standing are all in low-comp. niches!

hopefully for some of us, competitors will get smashed by this and our sites can move UP not down

A few in high competition and most in mid range .

I'm seeing some traffic come back up for the sites that got hit.

Question though, if for some reason they come back to normal and I make no changes then what's to say it won't happen again?

not a thing but google can do same to your new sites?

It is googles ball , googles court , google referees, and googles whatever else your move I guess

Have just come across this from Bill Slawski's excellent site on Google patents:

Google's Exact Match Domain Name Patent (Detecting Commercial Queries)

It's dated Oct 2011 and he writes the following:

A Google patent, originally filed in 2003, and granted today (with Matt Cutts as one of the listed inventors) describes this problem in more detail and provides some ways that Google could potentially act to lessen the value of keywords included in domain names by recognizing when queries are commercial in nature and using a different ranking algorithm for those queries that might lessen the value of domains with keywords in them.

The patent describes a number of possible steps that it might take to identify commercial queries.

The first step may be to obtain a list of user queries, and it might limit that list to keep it manageable. An example from the patent tells us that it might “retrieve those stored search queries that occur at least once per 100 million queries.” That could potentially limit the list to a few million or billion queries.

The next step might be to collect a list of phrases or keywords of interest to advertisers or webmasters or both. That can include phrases and keywords used in advertising or phrases/keywords used in meta tags.

A list of domain names that contain 2 or more hyphens might be gathered as well. We’re told in the patent that:

It is very common to see domain names that include a single hyphen, but when two, three, or more hyphens are present, this is often an indication that these domain names are associated with companies that are attempting to trick search engines into ranking their web pages more highly.

Similarly, Google might create a list of host names (subdomains) that it finds that contain more than a certain number of hyphens.

The lists of user queries, domain names, and host names might be processed in a number of ways, such as:

Removing stop words, digits, punctuation, etc. “For example, for the domain name “buy-credit-cards-online.com,” server may remove the hyphens and “.com” portion to leave the following phrase ‘buy credit cards online.’” In a query such as, “where can I find low apr credit cards,” the “where can I find,” might be removed to leave the phrase “low apr credit cards.”

An n-gram analysis of the list of domain names and host names might be performed to find combinations of words found in that list that tend to show up frequently.

For example, assume that the domain name list includes the domain name “buy-cheap-credit-cards-online.com.” Server may form the following exemplary n-grams for this domain name: “credit cards,” “buy cards,” “cheap cards,” “buy credit cards,” “cheap credit cards,” “buy cheap cards,” “buy card online,” “cheap cards online,” “credit cards online,” “buy credit cards online,” “buy cheap credit cards,” “buy cheap credit cards online.” Other n-grams may also be formed.

There's a lot more, I recommend people reading it. He links to the patent as well.

P.S. FWIW my dinged domain had only one hyphen

Also - people on Webmasterworld are reporting that something big happened to Image search at the same time, and one or two of them think another algo change was also released as some branded websites dropped (G's usual tactic of releasing multiple algos at once to confuse webmasters).

thanks for posting that Daisy, from everything I've read and watching the traffic the last couple of days I don't feel this is a penalty at all. I do feel that the traffic will start coming back BUT it won't be at 100%.

the video shows him saying they "turned the knob down a little" basically saying that as an EMD you'll still get traffic but you won't be as successful as a "brandable" site. They feel that a site that is brandable will get more work put into it and the intent of that website is to be more helpful than to just make money. The mixture of the keyword in the domain along with the keywords used for page names after that is one of the biggest causes for the shakeup no matter if you had an EMD, PMD, or whatever.

I'm willing to bet that a 301 will be good as well.

Originally Posted by Daisy

Also - people on Webmasterworld are reporting that something big happened to Image search at the same time, and one or two of them think another algo change was also released as some branded websites dropped (G's usual tactic of releasing multiple algos at once to confuse webmasters).

I'd give a big yes on that because I had three sites that were getting almost 200 uniques a day on images alone and now nodda.

Had a bit of a rant on my new podcast with silkysammy today about this update.

for those interested in some SEO ranting - The IM Society | Our First Podcast – EMD Update smashing sites & more