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Google EMD Update... Sinking Websites by the Dozen!

October 2, 2012

Google announced a new algorithm change last week that took effect over the weekend... this update is not associated to Panda or Penguin and it's aimed at Exact Match Domain names (EMD)... but I assert that it IS related to Panda and Penguin in that it's punishing a lot of valid web sites and still rewarding sites that should not rank as high as they do... so like Panda and Penguin, it misses the mark... unless, Google's aim is to get more people BUYING ads vs. relying on good SEO to get found.

So what exactly is an Exact Match Domain name? Let's say your company name is BigBoyTrucks and you register a domain name called BigBoyTrucks... that's an EMD, or, if you sell off road tires for trucks, you register a domain such as OffRoadTires... that's an EMD... Google used to say that including your major keyword target in your domain name was a good thing... but no longer... well, that is if they consider your site to be "low quality"... and there's where the problem is: Google can't seem to accurately determine what low quality is and what it is not.

Long Tail Damage
My initial analysis of the EMD Update is that it slightly punishes the exact match searches by one or two notches in ranking, but SEVERELY punishes the long-tail keyword searches, even if they contain the exact match phrase. I have sites that have gone from first page ranking for several long-tail keyword phrases and are now ranking 200 to 400 deep (in other words they will never, never, never be found).

Matt Cutts of Google tweeted this on September 28, 2012: "Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results."

He later tweeted this on the same day: "New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin."

Here again, the term "low-quality" is key to this update - Google still can't figure out what is low quality... sites with unique content are being killed.. sites with products people want to purchase are being killed... while sites with neither are now ranking in the first few pages.

History of EMD Exploits and Google's Conflict of Interest.
One of the "secrets" that some Internet Marketing gurus have used to make Adsense revenue is to register sites that are exact match domain names to popular search terms, put some content on it, and load it up with Adsense ads... then build some links to it and after a while you would start making money from people finding the site and clicking on the ads... I think this type of site is what Google wants to kill... but the problem is, they're using a canon to kill a gnat... while the gnat is still flying around in a lot of cases. In fact, this is, in my opinion, what they've been trying to kill with Panda and Penguin all along...

But this creates a conflict of Interest for Google since they themselves profit from those Google Adsense ads... if this is in fact the type of sites Google wants to kill then why are they punishing sites without any ads? Why not start with their databases of sites using Adsense ads and examine them for quality?

But what Denotes Quality?
I know it's frustrating to search for something and find sites that are junk, not readable, or, just plain wrong... but if the content is unique and not gibberish then it should not be punished. Quality is not easily determined: if the site is useful to someone then it has quality... if even to help someone figure out that they need to change their search terms slightly then it's useful... which infers quality. And that it seems, is beyond Google's ability to determine with algorithms and quite possibly with real, live people.

It's getting harder and harder to keep Google happy... unfortunately, a lot of people never think to use Bing or Yahoo to perform searches, so in effect Google IS the Internet. Since Penguin was released, I've started making it a habit when searching for something to use both Google and Bing... in a lot of cases I've found better results on Bing.

How to Recover from Penguin, Panda, and the EMD Update?
In my previous post about Google Penguin I said that I would post more info when I had it on how to recover. I was just about ready to do that when this EMD update came out... I do have some recommendations for recovering from all these Google updates, but nothing will get you back to where you were before they hit... especially with this latest update. I will post my thoughts after we've had a few weeks to digest this EMD update.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred Black on October 2, 2012 | Printer-Friendly

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Comments:

From: Peter

Great piece.
It's obviously a difficult job to really track every webpage but it's such a shame that Google is penalizing companies for trying to make it easy for genuine customers to find genuine websites. I guess the "low quality" websites are the obvious ones that seem spammy. Let's hope so anyway.
Posted by Peter on October 3, 2012 3:11 AM
From: Ed

A lot of people in my industry try to buy several EMDs but I prefer to rely on keywords and keeping my blog updated. Am I doing the right thing?
I think so, and I think I'm building a quality website with useful posts, but I worry that Google (being a business not a service) will try something sneaky to get people to buy advertising!
Posted by Ed on October 3, 2012 12:59 PM
From: Joydeep

The recent EMD update was done to penalize those websites which had exact long phrase keyword match domain names. I suppose if you prepare a quality site and get the love of the people then no Google update can harm you. It is much better to focus on your strategy of pleasing your users rather than the search engines. The best way is to add fresh content on your site and get authority backlinks.Taking these two steps would go a long way in increasing the visibility of your website.
Posted by Joydeep on October 3, 2012 1:57 PM
From: Sky High

An effective information, I just want to add something why Google penalize several websites, it is not just maybe about spammy sites but also it is about websites that target eventually and purely "search engines" if businesses starts to target "real audience and real people" I am quite sure that there will be no sites experiencing penalties from Google.
Posted by Sky High on October 4, 2012 5:38 AM
From: Lucy

As it was popularly said by Bill Gates that Content is the king, today websites are in a constant struggle to please the search engines rather than keeping their head in the fresh content. They don't realize that genuine and qualitative content will eventually lead them to success. As to the Google's EMD update, lets hope the spam websites are the ones who gets deleted not the genuine ones.
Posted by Lucy on October 6, 2012 2:07 AM
From: Alex

This seems like a real kick in the teeth from google- how can they justify telling people that EMD's will help their ranking and then punish a seemingly random few for having them?
Posted by Alex on October 6, 2012 6:08 AM
From: Anthony

Great article explaining the changes. I can see why they might do this as people could simply just register all the keyworded domain names but not have a quality website
Posted by Anthony on October 7, 2012 4:25 AM
From: Bogdan

I didn't knew about the new update on the EMD's however I did know that there are more then few bad websites ranking high because the exact domain matches its keyword, and myself who's trying to get there in the top little by little need to work hard :(
Posted by Bogdan on October 7, 2012 7:37 AM
From: Andrew Rondeau

Fred,

I can only see more and more changes to the algorithm like this. It will take time for Google to determine quality content and until they do many good quality sites will be penalized.

Now is another good reason to add a blog to your static website.

Andrew
Posted by Andrew Rondeau on October 8, 2012 3:48 AM
From: Tommy

It's really a full time job keeping up with these changes all the time. Well as long as you write good content that people enjoy it shouldn't matter that much. I have not seen any drastic changes yet.
Posted by Tommy on October 8, 2012 11:49 AM
From Fred...

Tommy - the problem is, even sites WITH good unique are getting crushed...
Posted by Fred Black on October 8, 2012 1:52 PM
From: Ikeh

Great piece.
It's obviously a difficult job to really track every webpage but it's such a shame that Google is penalizing companies for trying to make it easy for genuine customers to find genuine websites. I guess the "low quality" websites are the obvious ones that seem spammy. Let's hope so anyway.
Posted by Ikeh on October 9, 2012 8:12 AM
From: thiru

I think only low quality websites will be penalizing even though we have EMD...
Posted by thiru on October 10, 2012 5:47 AM
From: stephen

It seems that in Google's quest to filter out the few spam sites that were getting through they have managed to turn the Google results into a giant advertising board for huge companies without any thought for presenting results that customers are looking for. I searched for a deal on an iPad the other day and it wasn't till I reached page 4 of google's results that any of the listings could actually sell me what I was looking for - it's completely ridiculous but I suspect Google will back peddle quite quickly on this one as before EMD the results were much more targeted and useful.
Posted by stephen on October 11, 2012 9:41 AM
From Fred...

Stephen;
You are correct... that's what I'm talking about...
Posted by Fred Black on October 11, 2012 10:01 AM
From: Simon

I agree Stephen, its was about time because many sites had taken advantage of that strategy. I hope that organic results will be much 'healthier' in a year's time.
Posted by Simon on October 11, 2012 1:07 PM
From: Jarrod

I am definitely looking forward to your followup articles on this topic!! I placed an emphasis on QUALITY EMD's, primarily in the calculator niche, and despite providing what I advertise with additional related information, Google's new update completely wiped me out! Super frustrating. Went from about 17K visitors a month for all sites, down to about 4K and still plunging (it's like the market crash of 07). Great article and it helped calm me down a little as I thought I was getting blacklisted.

I definitely agree in terms of Bing as well. Google's ulterior motive is to maintain a competitive position in providing "great" search results, but all they are doing is driving users (in particular their webmaster/patrons) elsewhere. Grrr.
Posted by Jarrod on October 12, 2012 9:49 AM
From Fred...

Jarrod;
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Quality sites selling or providing what people are looking for have been replaced by either sites with nothing directly related to the search, or, huge sites selling somewhat related items, or, sites with ads... makes no sense to me.

There is one type of site that seem to be immune to this, and I'm working on gathering enough data to make a post about it... stay tuned...

Posted by Fred Black on October 12, 2012 1:02 PM
From: Ejaz Alam

This EMD update has surely affected many genuine sites but we can still see numerous junk sites with ads only on them. I can't understand what algorithm is used by google for such crack down. Hope things improve soon.When is next post scheduled Fred ?
Posted by Ejaz Alam on October 13, 2012 2:33 AM
From: Mike Stevenbertg

I agree with you that content is the king but there are some blog are not really good or not interesting and informative post. The purpose of their post is to update there blog but therefore the info is not good.
Posted by Mike Stevenbertg on October 15, 2012 12:45 AM
From: Mike Stevenbertg

Thanks for the updates about EMD. I have experienced lately one of my site also gone in page one and not in top 100. my site domain name is also long tail and I don't have any idea that one of my keyword went down.
Posted by Mike Stevenbertg on October 15, 2012 2:35 AM
From: George

If these Google updates would do what they promise they'd do, it wouldn't be a problem. But if the key part is going against "low quality", this should be exactly what happens. Just one site with hq content going down in the process is one too many.
Posted by George on October 15, 2012 4:51 AM
From: Anton Grantham

I believe the only sure fire solution to the Google crack down is paid Google advertisement. You feed them and they will feed you. From the struggles I've seen from others, it almost seems cheaper to just join the Google pay per click campaigns.
Posted by Anton Grantham on October 15, 2012 3:25 PM
From: Kristina Marchant

Google's aim is to get more people BUYING ads vs. relying on good SEO to get found.-- That's exactly what they are doing. I see evidence of it, even in the mailers they sent to my house encouraging me to advertise
Posted by Kristina Marchant on October 16, 2012 2:02 AM
From: Tommy Anderssion

Fred - Okay, that's not good at all if these sites really are legit in every way. If that is the case then they should recover, because Google has no interest in destroying perfectly good sites.
Posted by Tommy Anderssion on October 16, 2012 2:55 AM
From: Nic

Though one of my site that use EMD have a declined, it's hard to tell if its because EMD update or panda / penguin refresh.

And while EMD isn't bad, unfortunately it's what spammers used these days.
Posted by Nic on October 16, 2012 2:58 AM
From: Watson

So is SEO completely dead nowadays? I have a lot of wasted research hours if so. Is having a monopoly illegal Google?
Posted by Watson on October 18, 2012 10:28 AM
From: Nicholas t

Never ever used Bing before but it might be a good one to start with now, sometimes I cant find what I want to on Google, and now I have used Bing a couple of times I see there are some differences! Thanks
Posted by Nicholas t on October 18, 2012 1:12 PM
From:

I think there is a fine line that has been crossed here. One can hardly brand a domain without having a brandable EMD can they? I understand if a domain is five words long with 4 hyphens, but short EMDs?
Posted by on October 20, 2012 4:18 PM
From: yosif

Absolutely right.Google have the knife and the bread and I don't like how it goes. We have been hit for the exact match though the exact mach is the name of the company. And we do not target viewers for the sake of adds. But I guess they have to do a lot of work and don't know how exactly to do it :)
10x for the post will await your info on how to recover.
Posted by yosif on October 22, 2012 1:36 PM
From: Designartusa

Is there any way to recover that website affected by algorithm?
Posted by Designartusa on October 22, 2012 3:06 PM
From: Avery Z Chipka

On the plus side this does help with the problem of people purchasing domains names with keywords related to there main site and loading it up with garbage content just to decrease the rating of the domain and in return increasing there own.
Posted by Avery Z Chipka on October 24, 2012 12:28 PM
From: Brian

How is Bing? Bing and Yahoo are the same now correct?
Posted by Brian on October 24, 2012 10:45 PM
From: Digital Publishing

If my website effects by this update.then what should I do for the recovery.It is quite difficult to change the domain name.
Posted by Digital Publishing on October 25, 2012 2:05 AM
From: Mark Steve

Google just try people to get more and more Google ads to stay on fb. Ads are big source of Google's earning and they want infinite from this, so they don't want seo they just want people to get their ads.
Posted by Mark Steve on October 25, 2012 4:43 AM
From: Anna

Actually I have an emd site which got a boost the last weeks to page 1 from 4. I am not very good in analyzing my seo efforts yet, so i can't really tell why this hapened...
I don't think the emd update is a bad thing, because why should a site rank higher only because it has the keyword in its address?
Posted by Anna on October 25, 2012 12:59 PM
From: Lisa

I like the idea of EMD. My sites have some less favourable keywords in the TLD, all designed to represent a "Brand" rather than actual keywords associated with a product. I have a passionate dislike for sites that have have a TLD that reflects exactly what they're about. As far as I see it, if your site's TLD can't stand up to being used in the real world (ie people mentioning the name to each other verbally), why would you use it online?

That aside, yes it is hitting some of the "larger" TLD's that used keywords, but those domains aren't that solid and should have thought about the design/ layout/ internal linking structure and of course backinks a little more...
Posted by Lisa on October 28, 2012 2:23 AM
From: Kausik

Thanks for sharing such an nice topic. I have just created a website javacracker.com. Its related to java blog. Please advice me whether its a correct EMD
Posted by Kausik on November 1, 2012 12:38 PM
From: Priyanka GitInfosys

EMD can provide the exact match domain name that help to create the keywords matching the domain name so that google can evaluate the site very well.
Posted by Priyanka GitInfosys on November 2, 2012 2:14 AM
From: Joseph @ blogging tips

Google are just messing with SERPs with all these unnecessary updates.
Posted by Joseph @ blogging tips on November 2, 2012 10:11 AM
From: Milo Kartusek

This doesn't really bother me, all the good keyword matching domains are already taken anyway...
Posted by Milo Kartusek on November 2, 2012 12:51 PM
From: Simen Platou

I don't think this seems like a bad thing at all. Being the top search engine out there, it is still way too many irrelevant results scoring high because of their domains!
Posted by Simen Platou on November 6, 2012 11:10 PM
From: Merina Daniel

Thnak you for sharing this valuable information.But i have one question that by this new algorithm change is there will be any problem in my website ranking?Will it go down or up?Can you please help out?
Posted by Merina Daniel on November 9, 2012 1:41 AM
From: Luka Paunovic

Merina, it can be a problem, I have same problem just because of new algorithm...
Posted by Luka Paunovic on November 9, 2012 6:14 PM
From: Freya

Very interesting post ! I'm a total newbie both in blogging and SEO but these kind of posts help me a lot to know from the beginning what to do or not do. Although it is sometimes a bit confusing cause whenever Google changes its algorithm, it means everything which I did before to try to get a ranking might have been for nothing?
Posted by Freya on November 16, 2012 10:35 AM
From: Bruce Johnson

I am a photographer in Raleigh and have been working, tweeking and tuning my own site for years. It just seems like google changes the rules dramatically every few years. This is what happens when one company has so much power.
Posted by Bruce Johnson on November 26, 2012 11:05 AM
From: John

yeah you are right and i agree with you after the updates of EMD's SEO like a Hell but google can't compromise duplication and not want to rise the illegal sites on first page of google that's why after all when we attached the field of SEO we are facing these types of problems...
Posted by John on December 14, 2012 8:36 AM
From: Alan Leenhouts | HoutsGraphics

There are way too many spammy exact matches, and websites that rank too high just because of their name. I'm glad for this update hopefully they'll get it right and stop punishing the good sites that happen to have been created before the new algorithm was created. kinda like grandfathered laws...
Posted by Alan Leenhouts | HoutsGraphics on December 23, 2012 12:42 PM
From: Matt

We have a few EMDs. Some have slumped and others are still on page one. There does not seem to be much consistency it all. Our site has dropped in the SERPs but we have other sites that are still at number 1.
Posted by Matt on December 24, 2012 5:27 AM
From: richard parker

still suffering badly from these updates i have re assembled my website with new content and relevant and i really found it difficult to scale it up some time these updates really sucks
Posted by richard parker on December 26, 2012 10:43 PM
From: Donny

I'm not sure if this is affecting me or others I know. But our traffic is DOWN!
Posted by Donny on January 4, 2013 1:31 AM
From: Colin

The EMD update is really unjust. Why target a site just because it has a good website name? Target the content or links but not the name!!
Posted by Colin on January 5, 2013 12:27 PM
From: Josh

Just when I though giving up wasn't an option. Feeling the ship sink at this moment. Thanks for the article!

Posted by Josh on January 9, 2013 9:14 PM
From: Cindy

Well I guess millions of websites will now have to re-think their strategy! Imagine the costs associated with this! I could bet it would be in the millions. But I guess it would create jobs.
Posted by Cindy on January 17, 2013 8:07 AM
From:

Very interesting post ! I'm a total newbie both in blogging and SEO but these kind of posts help me a lot to know from the beginning what to do or not do. Although it is sometimes a bit confusing cause whenever Google changes its algorithm, it means everything which I did before to try to get a ranking might have been for nothing?
Posted by on January 18, 2013 6:03 AM
From: Tyler tongkatali

The latest EMD update was in fact done to penalize those sites which had exact very long phrase key term match domain names. I think if you do decide prepare a tall high quality web site also as get the love of those then virtually no Google update can damage you. It is a whole lot better to focus in your strategy of pleasing the consumers prefer than the major major search engines. The greatest way is to add fresh content on your website since well as get impact backlinks.Taking these 2 techniques would go a really long method in increasing the visibility of all of the of your website.
Posted by Tyler tongkatali on January 19, 2013 2:32 PM
From: Ben

I think its unfair how top ranking websites are going from fist page to 40th or 50th page even.. I definitely agree that Google should use their adwords database to see which websites to clean up rather that the quality websites without the ads.
Posted by Ben on January 22, 2013 3:48 PM
From: Remiz.org

Meanwhile there appear thousand of new domain zones line .to and others. Is there any advantage for SEO from short two-symbols "elite" domain names?
Posted by Remiz.org on January 23, 2013 1:22 PM
From: Gary Swiftbonds

I have to agree with the article and comments on how the EMD update has created a lot of havoc with the different web sites. What I've really seen is that the sites that were punished were smaller sites. However, the larger backlinked sites seem to have done fine (if not better), which is exactly backwards of what you'd expect.

I understand the push to go social, but it's been difficult. Thanks.
Posted by Gary Swiftbonds on January 24, 2013 4:14 PM
From: Mimi

Newbie here and I have to say I did not get a degree in nuclear science, which is what you need to keep up with all the changes. I thought all the nuclear scientists made the algorhythms for Wall Street, but I see a few work for Google:)
Posted by Mimi on January 27, 2013 9:46 AM
From: Rahul

I think many people own spam domains to target a keyword. They buy 1000s of domains and put a backlink on each. This update should rule out this spamming now!
Posted by Rahul on February 3, 2013 1:42 AM
From: Juan

Google wants to increase its revenue via paid ads, even with good SEO, websites won't rank the top 10 anymore.
Posted by Juan on February 9, 2013 1:27 PM
From: linda

Wow that was a great article..
It is very frustrating to googel closest to punish websites in the dark.
I myself have suffered the same problem .. I have created a website that provides tips and guidance to people who want to plan a cheap funeral.
I can see many of the pages above me just have poor quality content
Posted by linda on March 10, 2013 10:23 AM
From: zia

this is nice article and information for me...
thans so much for sharing my friend...
nice to meet you....
Posted by zia on March 15, 2013 3:30 PM
From: abhijit jadhav

Google EMD is not clear as yet, many EMDs are still very active and successful, and then whats wrong in having a exact match domain. The hardwork is the same.
Posted by abhijit jadhav on April 29, 2013 6:44 AM