Google EMD. POST your site status Thread**

Day 1 September 28, 2012 - All day #3 position then around 8pm Got hit, traffic down 0 nowhere to be found
Day 2 September 29, 2012 - Recovered a little (294) ..traffic still down 0
Day 3 September 30, 2012 - Ranking (286) 0 traffic

I thought the little movement I had on Saturday morning was going to continue but it really hasn't moved. Think I will wait until Wednesday to see if anything happens but my gut tells me I'm screwed.

As far as traffic for my keywords I target, if I'm not in the top 4 then I don't get hardly any traffic. On the other hand I only have about 35 backlinks per site so maybe I should start a back-linking campaign which is not my strong point for sure but I need to work on this weakness I have.

In my opinion asking for the site owner to answer that is always going to be biased towards their own interest. Of course they are going to say their sites are good quality but without sharing the URL and allowing unbiased review of their sites we are not really going to be able to determine good / bad quality. Do you agree?

Don't quit, just make sites differently.

My site has taken a beating and it's not even an exact match domain, but it got destroyed starting September 28th.

I'll give out my main keyword because the site only makes about $10.00 per month and I mostly run it for fun.

The keyword I'm targeting is "Play Hangman". I created a Javascript Hangman game. The site is 100% original coding done by me and the graphics are all done by myself as well. My site is www.justhangman.com and I was previously ranked third in google. I now rank somewhere around 670 for that keyword.

Everybody talks about how their sites are high quality and I feel mine is as well. It delivers exactly what the searcher is looking for. A place to play hangman online.

I was getting 50-70 visitors a day. Saturday I got 10, Sunday 7, and today so far... one visitor. I'm don't understand why my site was targeted? It's not exact match for my keyword and has great site engagement. Here are my stats from Google Analytics for the past month:

Visits: 1,529
Unique Visitors: 1,156
Pageviews: 10,561
Pages/Visit: 6.91
Avg. Visit Duration : 00:07:17
Bounce Rate: 31.72%
% New Visits: 71.68%

I feel like I have a nice visit duration and a pretty low bounce rate.

I know some of you are probably wondering, why are you giving away your keyword, website, and stats?

If I'm only getting 1-10 visitors a day everybody else can have at my keywords. I'm obviously not providing what Google wants. What they actually want is a mystery to me.

I have 7 keyword rich domains, (not EMDs) some are big some are smaller, some are good, some are could do with more content. The sites target the UK market with UK domain extensions.

Traffic dropped 70%-80% (approximately) across the portfolio. So far no recovery.

So my feeling that is is not just for US search, and it is not just for EMDs. I can still see plenty of EMDs ranking in my niches, many of them are much lower quality then mine. My lost sites all had similar layouts and structures targeting different niches.

Hoping for recovery

Same situation here. My website is not EMD, it has 210 unique and high quality articles and is 3 years old. I have not been affected by the Panda and Penguin updates at all and I was getting around 1500 visitors a day. After Sept29 my traffic dropped by 75%. That is so frustrating. I don't know what went wrong. All my links are organic without any manual link building or anything.

Out of interest, do you use webmaster tools? The only site of mine that was affected is the only emd I have on wmt. The rest have jump up or stayed with no work on them.

Want to know what's even more messed up?

Matt Cutts website still ranks #1. Yet go look at his homepage, it's bare, it's incredibly low quality.. Worst website ever. Then go to his blog, his link structure isn't easy to read, it's not correct. He doesn't have a custom theme, it's incredibly bare and low quality.. Only thing he has going for him is content.

In short, he does everything he tells SEO's not to do, lol. (Aside from backlinks)

My site is affected too. With the domain name as keyword search, my site WAS on page 1 in Google Search. Now its no where to be found (it is above page 10+). However, in Bing and Yahoo search, it is still page 1.

I have another site domain name uses an actual name (example: tomjerry dot com). The keyword targeted on "Education Material", the keywords have no relationship with domain name. The ranking of this site went up.

The structure and setup of both sites are the same. I have both adsense and Clickbank ads in it.

How to get my position back in Google search???

Im currently using Serp Fox. I love everything about it.

-Omar

All my Amazon sites, some of which are EMD and some of which are EMD + short word have dropped off the map. All my niche site income went practically to zero overnight, and no sign of any recovery.

Most of these sites had close to 10 pages of all unique high quality written content written by myself. This really stinks...

5 emds of mine - all gone.

2 gallery sites + 1 amazon + 2 product blogs(actual products and not affiliate ones. have unique content).

1 of them got back on the top page for a while last night(12 hrs ago). Gone again...

Just took a quick glance at this site. You should take a look at the text version of the site. It is not far from being a blank page. That is probably why it is not ranking. Google cannot read javascript and tell you have a hangman game.



The backlinks is kind of a big deal. Do you know how many truly natural backlinks that site attracts? More than you could ever dream of.

Nobody is trying to rank for the term "Matt Cutts". There is really no competition.

This argument is always silly to me. You can use Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics and rank just fine. What is it you really think you are hiding from Google by not using it?

Generally, Google penalizes or decreases the ranking of sites for 2 reasons. The first is onsite issues such as hidden text, doorways, etc. The second is what Google determines to be low quality or spammy backlinks. Whether you use GWT and GA or not, Google has all the information they need about those things.

Now if you want to go with one of the paid options, hey go for it. There are far better analytic tools out there, but you are going to pay for them.

I also lose the SERP during this update and bounce rate goes high,so what to do this to kept position back??






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My 6 month old EMD (with excellent content) site has gone from 20 visitors a day, to .... zero visitors a day.

Cheers Google.

Are you guys recovering for the Keyword in your domain?
Are you ranking using on page SEO or backlinks?

Google rolled out a Panda Update the day before the EMD update, So some EMDs not hit by the EMD update, might of got hit with the Panda Update.

I have noticed rotation in my niches.

Some of my sites that that were on the first and second page got blasted ~ as did some other EMD and thin affiliate sites in my niches.

However, other sites that were way down, say page 5+ have now moved up, for myself and other competitor sites.

It is almost as G has decided to shake everyone up - remove those that have been near the top for a while making money, and giving others a chance to be at the top. G is ensuring everyone gets their just dessert, and no one takes the bulk of the money.

But what I find strange, is that some of my sites where are reasonable quality, are now being outranked by a single article on a totally unrelated domain name.

My site has bounced back. It was #2 on Google before the EMD update, it's now number 8. I am happy with this as i feared it was blown away

I disagree, there is a solid pattern with this and all the Panda/Penguin updates. Giant sites and brands that generate huge Adwords revenue for Google - THEY consistently improve. Smaller sites that are not revenue sources of significance for Google are consistently hurt. That is the only real clear result that I can decipher.

Buying traffic is what google wants.


Terry

SET 1 - EMDs overly optimized ( > 95% on Easy WP SEO plugin) - Rank dropped by 20-30

SET 2 - EMDs with not so much optimized pages but having content from related keywords. The keyword relevance is not from Google Keyword Tool LSI but from a end user perspective. Drop was not that severe. After the drop they seem to be coming back to normal ranking again.

SET 3 - PMDs - Not too much change.

Every single EMD site I have got hit - zero traffic the last few days from google...

my sites are still down all PMDs. Income down too, not surprising.

Not any current domains, but I just let the domain expire that got hit bad in April. proteinshakerecipesguide.com It was #2 for "protein shake recipes" and climbing for "protein shakes." I made a lot more per month than I expected for the keywords. Turned out I was getting a lot of unintended traffic for longtail keywords that I wasn't targeting.

I used blog-blueprint.com as the blogging network and linkwheels from fiverr. I targeted "protein shake recipes" way too much, but that was before Penguin

I got sent to Google Hell and was replaced by Bodybuilding.com--another authority site that had lower quality content on that specific topic than my site. But they have authority, and Google rewarded them.

Ok here are 2 sites of mine that are currently receiving much more traffic than they were previously. Bear in mind these are blatent anti Google type sites with no unique content. I like the technical aspects of running websites so I love messing with servers and so on. All my sites run off a home server ( over 60 huge database driven websites ) and all off home broadband. Anyways these 2 sites are flying now and making quite a lot of money:

Computer Systems - Computer Systems And Monitors From Featured UK Companies

Cycles - BMX Bikes, Kids Bikes, Mountain Bikes, Road Bikes, Touring Bikes And Cycling Accessories From Featured UK Companies.

If you look at the footer you will see identical sites with different products many of which are dead but some are in fact now active. They should really help you form some sort of conclusion I think.

The footer links are not the same as many of the sites urls as I have used 301 htaccess redirects a lot to send them to new domains. Confusing ain't it?

Was that even necessary?

There's a reason I distance myself from pessimistic f*cks like you. So far my "hunch" is proving itself to be correct and i'm seeing it even in the sites that have been given to me for review. Only thing left to do is run a few tests for myself. But I don't expect you to understand how real SEO works so you just keep following the crowd. If you don't have a question or anything of value to add to this community then please find your way to the nearest exit.

"Those that say it can't be done should get out of the way of those that are doing it."

edit: Sorry to derail this thread, please ignore and continue.

Do you get any traffic through yahoo/bing? If you can make some money on it why not keep it?

could you give us also those other small changes you did?