Google EMD. POST your site status Thread**

by 106 replies
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Guys, i know alot of you were effected. My site was affected too during the first day.

Day 1 September 28, 2012 - Got hit, traffic down 6k
Day 2 September 29, 2012 - Recovered a little ..still down 4k from avg traffic
Day 3 September 30, 2012 - Almost full recovery.

Post your status
#search engine optimization #emd #google #post #site #status #thread
  • Day 1 September 28, 2012 - Extremely high competitive keyword ranked #54
    Day 2 September 29, 2012 - Same keyword jumped to #1
    Day 3 September 30, 2012 - Still ranked #1
  • Day 1 September 28, 2012 - All EMDs apart from 2 vanished from ranks (most were ranked 4th-20th).
    Day 2 September 29, 2012 - Still not back
    Day 3 September 30, 2012 Still not back

    I'm going to wait and see how many come back within the next days. Hopefully some will come back.
  • Day 1 September 28, 2012 - All EMD's totally gone and 2 sites non emd also totally gone - Zero traffic via 17 domains
    Day 2 September 29, 2012 - Still not back in AM, during PM a few pages creeping back, mainly more obscure search terms
    Day 3 September 30, 2012 No change so far. I am really hoping for at least a partial recovery as our business income relied on these.
  • All EMDs are ranking fine.
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
  • No change on my EMDs. They are all multiple page, good quality, grammatically correct sites and although they are EMD they also target multiple other keywords.
  • Same as above as far as page quality. I moved up from #6-#1 and #8-#3
  • Can someone with lost ranking let us know if the websites that vanished from SE were of low quality or not? Did they have natural link profile (many links from different sources)?
    • [1] reply
    • 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?
      • [2] replies
  • all my MNFs are gone even my money site which has lots of content has dropped from 4k visits/day to 2k.
  • 2/3 EMDs completely blasted out of the serps.

    No recovery. My biggest site has went from 300 visitors a day to 8 EEP
  • 2 of my best money making websites are gone. No recovery. I am gonna start looking for a job today. Very sad and worried.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • I think most of my EMDs gone as I lost at least 80% impression in adsense.

    Maybe this game is not for me. I am thinking to quit.
    • [1] reply
    • Don't quit, just make sites differently.
      • [2] replies
  • 17 EMD domains - all 17 blasted without trace - hoping for maybe some recovery
  • My bigger sites got blasted. My smaller sites seem OK.

    My writing is OK, but at the end of the day I don't actually sell the widget in question. The big G is giving us clues that for many queries it is wanting to see FORUMS and ANSWERS type sites.

    In the IT niche, I can give you an example - StackOverflow.com has stolen most of my IT questions type traffic ("how do I write a table join", that type of stuff).

    One site you can see is HubPages. My Hub Google traffic is down 90%! Ouch. I don't know if other Hubbers were hit so much.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • All my EMDs are ranking fine - that said by posting this I have probably jinxed myself and will see them drop tomorrow :-/
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • I have a site with 60 pages of unique content. The domain is not an EMD and has nothing to do with the search results. My traffic is down 80% after this update.

    This is my first experience with this kind of impact and it is so frustrating.
    • [2] replies
    • 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
      • [1] reply
    • 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.
  • I have several EMDs and have not noticed any change, but they have relatively low traffic so they have lots and peaks and valleys. It would be hard to see any trend in a 3-day period. I'll post back in a week.
  • 0% Hit. 100% of my sites are fine. Most even jumped way up, plenty sit on page #1 now.. Some of my projects I didn't have time to finish, or do extensive backlinking on jumped 5-25 spots average. Best update yet, at least for my sites. Ranking an EMD for a client soon here, going to follow my same process, not much has changed on my end.

    Sorry to hear about your losses guys, I'm sure there's a way to recover. I'm looking into it further.
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
      • [2] replies
  • No hits here. The sites I had #1 rankings on are still #1. Those that weren't #1 have moved up not down.
  • Banned
    Trying to rank and stay ranked in Google is like building a house on thin toothpicks. It's just a matter of time until you get a few bad backlinks or Google views your site even 1% in a negative way and you're dropped. You can even play by their rules and still be dumped. It's ridiculous.
    • [2] replies
    • 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)
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
    • 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???
  • Mine droped 3 positions it was number #2 on the first page, after 2 days it got back to #3, hopefully it will get back to second place
  • 3 of my website burned.

    for now any improvement in the serp.
  • 2 emds first page
    2 general domain with 50+ tanked

    I don't like to say penalty because I don't consider every drop to be a penalty unless I'm positive and I don't believe I deserve #1 like everybody else. I see it as ok maybe I deserve to be on page 8 what can I do to make it better. That's different from a penalty.
  • Banned
    Speaking of watching your rankings, what tools do you guys use to monitor your ranking positions?
    • [1] reply
    • Im currently using Serp Fox. I love everything about it.

      -Omar
  • I use the rankerizer, or TT4.
  • 1. All EMD's completely tanked
    2. No difference
    3. Some keywords move from 500 to 400. Slight movement.
  • This makes no sense. My EMD was not ranked for its term, but was slowly gaining rank for other terms and subpages. It is nowehere to be seen since september 29th. So not just emd that got it.
    • [1] reply
    • 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...
  • I have 7 sites ,3 emds
    My main 2 emds are still page 1 on all search engines,i lost one but it has just started to come back and is now on page 2 but at the bottom.
  • Some of my sites which are on page one (Niche Directories) are not seen for those keywords today. One site has 9000 listings related to that Niche.
  • 18 sites shot down, but not surprised they were pretty thin. Was going to drop most of them when it came round to renewing domains.
  • What do I do to recover my site?
  • One of my "high quality" EMDs dropped 2 spots for it's EMD KW, and totally vanished for the non EMD keyword. Weird huh?

    The other EMD (low quality) still ranking #1. This is a local keyword though.
    • [7] replies
    • 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.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [2] replies
    • I also lose the SERP during this update and bounce rate goes high,so what to do this to kept position back??






      __________________________________________________ __________________________________
      Website Development | Website Development Services | Website Design | Website Design Services
      • [1] reply
    • 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
  • One of my 3 smaller sites that were hit has magically reappeared in it's original position this morning So there is hope.

    My 3 most important EMD sites were all unaffected - 1 is a 70+ page 3yr old site with good link profile, the other 2 both under 1yr old, under 10 pages, little link building. But decent enough, not-over-optimised content I guess.
  • Some of my sites are seeing a little recovery.

    My non-EMD domains have been hit hardest. Strangely, the EMD I bought here on the Warrior Forum has had a surge in traffic (it's cheapgreenwidgets.com).

    Strangely, some of my sites are OK, others not so OK. Sites with no link building seem better, but like the other updates it's hard to determine why one site is hit and others survive.
  • What I find most worrying is that there seems to be no clear pattern.
    For me it's very unclear what to do or not to do. There are lots of people here with sites with a lot of quality content (of course can't verify that) who are being hit as well.

    I can understand that thin sites are hit, but when sites with a lot of content are hit as well, I just don't get it.

    Hopefully some smart people will be able to recognize a pattern soon...
    (we will be seeing a lot of WSO's then about this, I suspect)
    • [1] reply
    • 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
  • Some websites of mine are gone from rankings. Not EMDs BUT all of them had backlinks from EMD websites (i had manually submited to them).

    So my backlinks were FROM EMDs and since they lost their traffic, i lost my traffic also. Go figure.
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
  • All my websites got hit, EMD and Non-EMD :/ f*cking days
  • I have 3 EMDs and of them 1 is presently my money website since the other two are receive little or no traffic. The one that got hit received an average of 2200 with the following stats:
    Page per visit: 3.86
    Average visit duration: 01:49
    New visits: 82.18%
    Bounce rate: 0.27%

    This one got hit seriously as now I get just about 20 visits a day now. And by all standards in niche, though it is PR1 1-year old site, the content is nothing near low quality. Personally written and well-researched.
  • Site 1 Partial EMD - Dropped from page 1 for all keywords
    Site 2 EMD - dropped to position 78 from position 2
    Site 3 EMD - I can't even find it
    Site 4 EMD - Was position 5... now I can't find it at all


    I have more sites they have all been punished 70% of my sites are 20-30 pages of original content...

    I see a few sites with fewer pages EMD 100 for a keyword im targeting and they haven't been affected at all..
  • Google definitely tweaked something, I have a bunch of sites and saw changes around the 28th. Some websites lost traffic by about a 1/3, some increased traffic by about 1/3 typical Google... its not obvious what the common denominator to cause the change is.
  • Too many metrics, mostly are downhill but a few surprises. Just wait it out to see where you stand after the dancing.
  • I'm new here, but thought I HAD to reply. We own (8) stores all within a particular industry. Each store relates to an individual niche, in the industry . . . so our stores are named as such. Our most important store, for the season, got hit hard. And yes, it is an EMD, as it has been for 4.5 years (keywordkeywordUSA.com)

    Day 1 September 28, 2012 - Got hit, traffic down 3,000
    Day 2 September 29, 2012 - Massive slide to 400 visitors, down 5,100
    Day 3 September 30, 2012 - Slightly up to 500 visitors, down 5,000

    Store has no ads, good link profile, unique content, manufacture info on product pages - similar to text of competition, yet written to be somewhat unique. Page 1 for 4.5 years for 100's of terms, now totally gone.
    • [1] reply
    • Every single EMD site I have got hit - zero traffic the last few days from google...
  • My traffic has increased twice after the Update
    • [1] reply
    • my sites are still down all PMDs. Income down too, not surprising.
  • My question is this...If you ran a small business...in a shop for example...would you buy that shop, add content, etc only to find the following month the council come along and change the road or remove the pedestrian area? No is the answer and yet we are constantly coming up with sites, ranking them only for Google to change the game and then you lose your traffic, hey presto, business gone...

    What with Panda in 2011, Penguin in April and now this I have just had enough of Google. Matt Cutts is a t**t and I cannot wait for Bing/Yahoo and/or Facebook to really eat away at Google's search dominance - something needs to happen - lots of small, local businesses foolish enough to play to Google's tunes are taking a lot less money this week - e.g. taxi firms, florists, restaurants, all companies that were bound to have exact match domains because hey, if I want a taxi from Stansted Airport why would I click on some random looking company say called tick-t**ck taxi I'd want to click on a domain that has Stansted Taxi in the domain.

    Google sucks and they are killing businesses all over the place - shame on you Matt Cutts!
  • I have around 45 more or less identical EMD sites each of which deals with different product ranges. These are large affiliate database driven sites of which some have around 100,000 pages. They all died a death with the latest update but 2 are now getting much more traffic than they were previously. Some others are starting to get some visitors but the vast majority are still dead in the water. I don't hold much hope of them recovering to be honest. I think the ones that have recovered and improved have less competition - cycles and computer systems - with exact model type searches being carried out.

    Lets face it Google wants to make money from everything affiliates get involved in so we are potential threats. Google shopping, Google this and Google that. They want it all and more besides. I don't trust them an inch and I try to keep my activities as low key as possible with no usage of webmaster tools and so on. If they take a dislike to you bang you are deindexed or penalized or something. You could become extremely paranoid about them quite easily. I could well be already! I hope to hell other search engines gain ground and ruin the b******s to be honest.
  • Anyone willing to share your actual site urls? I've been pouring through a lot of data these past few days from over 50 sites and I think i might be on to something but I need a bigger sample pool to analyze. You can shoot me a PM if you like and i'd be happy to share with you any results I find.
    • [2] replies
    • 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.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • 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?
      • [1] reply
  • Google wants you to pay for traffic, end of story. Quit trying to figure them out.
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
  • (EMD) Exact Match Domain for Google new algorithm.
  • Day 10 (07-10-2012)My only EMD website got hit.

    It is a three month website, and was on #2 of google first page.
    I tried to search my keyword using different computers and proxy sites.
    Some show it on #10 of first page, some show #4, and some show ... nowhere

    And I just started my second website 2 week agao, which also EMD. Now I don't know if I should continue to do it...
  • No significant changes for me.

    Before anyone starts giving up totally, they should at least give it another shot but this time try to get traffic from non-Google sources.

    It's been said many times before by different people.
  • Day 1 - Sept 28 - Traffic Went Down
    Day 2 - Sept 29 - Traffic went further down
    Day 3 - Sept 30 - EMDs gone and so do non-EMDs - Traffic down to 2-3. 2 websites disappeared!

    EMDs showing higher position on Bing. Hopefully traffic also recovers.
  • I don't think the shake up is quite over as a few others of my sites have started to get traffic, more traffic in some cases than before. It was mentioned that it would take to the middle of next week or so to eventually settle.

    Funny thing I can see one of my sites (a small category of a much larger site and therefore using exactly the same and duplicated content) is getting far more traffic than the much larger one. Could be something to do with indexing rather than anything else, with the smaller site targetting products in that niche more so than being lost in the big site.
  • I had 3 EMDs fall off the face of the Internet. All 3 used to be on page 1 until big G change their policy :-(

    None of them gets any traffic now and I may not renew the domains next month.
    • [1] reply
    • Do you get any traffic through yahoo/bing? If you can make some money on it why not keep it?
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • EMD UPDATE
    Day 20: Traffic back to normal and seems to be gaining now. I was down 6k in traffic but now got it all back + MORE!

    Did I do changes to my site? Yes. A couple. One example is by upgrading my VPS (server).

    I am benefiting from the Algo change. It seems easier to rank higher. Matt Cutt's been telling us the answer all along from the start.
    • [1] reply
    • could you give us also those other small changes you did?




  • My EMD site is back but not on primary keywords. Used to be between number 1 and number on all Toyota Hilux and Toyota hilux Vigo related searches as Toyota Vigo Thailand, Toyota Vigo Double Cab, Toyota Hilux vigo Smart Cab, Toyota hilux Vigo extra cab, Toyota hilux dealer and so on. Dropped to page 3 on all this when the update first showed up then gradualrly clawed up and am now on first page but on bottom half of the page.

    Surprisingly though traffic which had fallen to 25% of its original traffic gradually rose to 50% and is now back to its original strength but in new keywords where I never scored high. Would love to be back on my primary keywords as most of my customers buy Toyota Hilux.
  • After EMD update my keywords derank and I still cant their original position.
  • Banned
    what tools do you guys use to monitor your ranking positions?
  • SEOWales.org #4 next to no activity.
    QuickHouseSale.net #7 next to no activity.
    SEONorwich.net #5ish next to no activity.
    SEOOutsourcing.net #3ish next to no activity.
    And so on.

    Everything fine here, what a lot of panic about nothing.
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