Matt Cutsts just announced a new Google update

as always with these updates, the results are extremely inconsistent and don't really make a pattern. overall, my EMDs are unaffected, meanwhile a fitness-oriented site that has about 4000 words of very strong content went from #3 for its term to nowhere. another site with longer, better-written articles completely disappeared out of the top 100.

you can split hairs about which direction to move in, what to do, what not to do, but i think the big reminder is to diversify.. solely making EMD sites or solely making "authority" sites can get you hosed. it's like diversifying your portfolio in the stock market. if your EMDs tank, you've spread the risk through a gradient of site thickness, so the hit will be a minor setback instead of something that can absolutely trash your bottom line
 


as always with these updates, the results are extremely inconsistent and don't really make a pattern.

There is a pattern. You're just missing it.

I do agree with diversifying as much as you can though.
 
A lot of you have probably read my post-penguin ranking thread here. Well the site that I built as part that of was apparently hit in this recent update. Every keyword, except for my main keyword phrase dropped 60-80 spots overnight.

It's not an EMD, but it has my keyword in the url. It was by no means a thin or low quality EMD. The backlink profile was well distributed across many anchors and unanchored links. With ahrefs showing 7k links, only a few were sitewide and the nofollow/dofollow is in the 30%/70% range. No spammy links like shitty mass blog commenting. In fact I had homepage links on a ton of great, related content sites. The onpage SEO was in good shape, not keyword stuffed at all, with over 45+ pages of unique content etc.

Until a couple days ago I had over 20 keywords all ranking in the top 15 and most were in the top 10, and improving daily.

I honestly have no idea why this site was hit. Maybe it will bounce back, who knows, but I'm even more lost than ever now. I have some other, newer sites that weren't EMD's, but close to emd, that were not hit. These have far fewer links and even less content, so again, I don't even know what to make of this.

SIDE NOTE: This site was a replacement site for one that had been hit by penguin back in April. As of two days ago, the old site has seen a big jump in the SERP's for many of it's keywords, however it's still penalized for the main keywords which were anchor over optimized. Not sure what that means either yet, but it's an interesting observation.
 
SKaww.jpg



"no."

Matt Cutts is obviously not amused by us joking about his estimates. ESTIMATES ARE NO LAUGHING MATTER ಠ_ಠ

LOL! Terrible! This is really annoying! Matt Cutts job requires a lot of patience... :laughing-smiley-007
 
This is why I parked all of my EMD's. Wait..too many tags.

BTW, Matt eats lunch regularly at Fu Lam Mum in Mountain View. When he makes announcements like this, he laughs at all of you at at lunch time while he Tapatalks this forum and sucks umbrella drinks until the insides of his cheeks touch with fellow gay Google heavies. True story.
 
so my site, was not an EMD but it had the keyword in the domain

I had some targeted content but also a lot of un-related content for 'entertainment'

So the theory I saw above is not quite accurate at all. I'd say my site was 50% related to my keyword, if that high at all

I see sites with ALL related content and EMD still #1
 
I have an ecom site whose domain I picked purely for branding purposes. The brandname isn't related to the keywords I'm trying to rank for at all, but of course, I have a lot of brand name anchors pointing at the home page, because that just looks natural (or at least based on my research in this particular niche, it does). Strangely, I've actually moved up a few places for this brandname kw since the EMD update.
 
Also, efeezy, my condolences. Your guide gave many SEO's hope after those brutal algo changes. It's disheartening to know that even you are feeling rudderless right now.
 
Here's the pattern. If you have an EMD that makes sense, you should still be fine.

For example, I have a branded "product" mentioned in credible places, and my "emd" site for that brand still ranks at the top. I have a few EMDs from back in the day I bought for "keyword" ranking reasons. They are in the abyss.

Think "Joe's Red Widgets" vs. "Best Red Widgets"

If your site is the authority site for that EMD, you rank. If not, you take your chances. While content quality may be a factor to keep you ranking if you are "the site" for the EMD, IMO it will not help you if you are not.


You guys must be building some shitty fucking sites.

I have an EMD, rather newish within the last 6 months that has hardly no content on it at all ( 3 pages, avg content per page is less then 100 words each ) and nothing but some relevant blog comment postings ( manual, not AA ) and I hit #1 ( had been #7 ) from the last update that just updated a few weeks ago.

I check that same EMD today and its still #1.

My thoughts are, this did hit some EMD's.. but only EMD's that fell into a certain filter. I have low content/thin content and my EMD is new, and I only used blog comments to rank it and most of my anchors were either:

1. The main KW I was going for
2. RAW URL
 
A lot of you have probably read my post-penguin ranking thread here. Well the site that I built as part that of was apparently hit in this recent update. Every keyword, except for my main keyword phrase dropped 60-80 spots overnight.

It's not an EMD, but it has my keyword in the url. It was by no means a thin or low quality EMD. The backlink profile was well distributed across many anchors and unanchored links. With ahrefs showing 7k links, only a few were sitewide and the nofollow/dofollow is in the 30%/70% range. No spammy links like shitty mass blog commenting. In fact I had homepage links on a ton of great, related content sites. The onpage SEO was in good shape, not keyword stuffed at all, with over 45+ pages of unique content etc.

Until a couple days ago I had over 20 keywords all ranking in the top 15 and most were in the top 10, and improving daily.

I honestly have no idea why this site was hit. Maybe it will bounce back, who knows, but I'm even more lost than ever now. I have some other, newer sites that weren't EMD's, but close to emd, that were not hit. These have far fewer links and even less content, so again, I don't even know what to make of this.

SIDE NOTE: This site was a replacement site for one that had been hit by penguin back in April. As of two days ago, the old site has seen a big jump in the SERP's for many of it's keywords, however it's still penalized for the main keywords which were anchor over optimized. Not sure what that means either yet, but it's an interesting observation.

Honestly efeezy, how many of those 7k links were actually not only very related, but coming from sites somehow trusted by google and not part of some network.
 
lol this thread again.gif

So much ignorance up in hurr..good job, Matt! Keep it up buddy!
I like it more when you assrape wickedfire and tell everybody how stupid they are while simultaneously bragging about how we're stacking cash like Mexican cartels.
 
Honestly efeezy, how many of those 7k links were actually not only very related, but coming from sites somehow trusted by google and not part of some network.

Probably 75% of those links are on related sites. They're definitely not part of a network as I went around contacting individual webmasters in my niche trying to get a little link love going. As for how trusted they are by Google, the only metric I have in determining that was the fact that I went after links on the top 3 search results for any given query, and I got a lot of them. Not sure if high rankings = trusted in Google's eyes anymore though.
 
I like it more when you assrape wickedfire and tell everybody how stupid they are while simultaneously bragging about how we're stacking cash like Mexican cartels.

Meh, if you find yourself posting in everyone of these update threads, you already know how stupid you are. I see you creeping up on my #1 rankings though, guess you and Skohh don't need to be up in this pity party.