How to deal with EMD penalty?

[Quime]

After some research I would say my site have been hit by an EMD penalty, it seems many other people have faced the same.

It would be very useful to know how to deal with this, many topics discuss the reasons behind it, but few have a realistic response for fast action.

I am in two minds - one would be to try and improve content etc, but this is subjective and could take any amount of time, or never resolve the issue.

The other would be to move the content to a new URL, which poses the question, should I do a 301 redirect, or would this just transfer the penalty?

If no redirect, then I am proposing starting fresh - as the sites hit by EMD penalties are deemed 'low quality' this might be the fastest way to recovery.

If I move the old content to my established main site as a sub folder, would this cause any problems?

Many thanks for people responses.

[edwardrj]

Keep in mind that many non-EMD sites were also hit around the time the EMD effect went into place. Some folks have claimed this result is very similar to the -950 "penalty" from a few years back

[Quime]

That what I would have initially thought but it took down all 4 of our foreign pages at the same time which have EMD, leaving the original site which has no EMD.

I am guessing that all effects of the updates don't happen exactly on the day

[Carlos-R]

After the 5th of October? The EMD update was released on the 28th of September.

Funny enough, there was a Penguin update on Friday, the 5th of October. The impact of the EMD update on non English websites is very, very small if anything at all.

My money is on your website being affected by Penguin, not EMD

[Quime]

it dropped to pretty much below 50 -70 after the 5th fro all its SERPS that were originally in the top 10. The English version was not touched. The written content I can guarantee is unique.

[Carlos-R]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your kind words. I completely agree, if you own and EMD and have been doing things well you should have very little to worry about.

They say that bad things come in threes, I'm sure that the sites that have seen a dramatic drop in positions have been affected by more than just the EMD update.

SEO stuff was never easy, and now Google is making it near impossible for most people to get it right.

Cheers

[RobertFisher]

I would say this,

Instead of saying how many, present one that has good content, etc. and was affected by the EMD and let's dissect it to see what we all learn.

[RobertFisher]

There is no correlation to search results and affected pages. Simply put, EMD also means electro magnetic discharge and many SEO's blogged about the EMD from Google without having necessarily experienced an adverse occurrence.

[SEOAndy]

SEO is not an exact science, that's for sure, but there are some things we can understand from looking at statistics and analytics and one of those things is that EDMs have lost some of their power and if you don't have good SEO to back that up, or you have 'slacked' on other aspects of SEO because your EDM was holding you up, then you are naturally going to see drops.

Like Carlos said, before the update having an EDM gave you ten points, now with the change EDMs only give 3 points, so if you aren't picking up points in other places, you are going to naturally see drops down the rankings.

[Quime]

I think one thing that is clear is that there are no clear answers, you can trawl through sites. forums, blogs etc, and find 100's of conflicting suggestions, reasoning and advice. I agree that the EMD update was not classified as a penalty, but I think if you dig a little deeper you will see that some legitimate websites were severely hit by this update, mainly in niche markets on relatively new websites. Agreed that this is often down to bad content, but not always. Could it be that the update is not actually that accurate in finding the exact 'spammers' that Google was aiming for. Of course people need to work hard, not take short cuts and do research, but sometimes there is more to it.

[Quime]

If think many people were effected, when you search 'EMD penalty' you get 496,000 results. The question is how to respond to a huge drop in SERP, and sometime a business can not afford to make changes and wait and see if google will reverse anything, because often this simply does not happen.

[RobertFisher]

Quime

I would suggest that Google provides more information on "low quality content" than you may be aware of. I will provide one example from GWT:

**"Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content." **

So, I would provide an if/then: If, you are using authorship and taking credit for the content, Then, Google is likely seeing it as more trusted (better) content. Yes, not exact, but if the content were constantly spun or stolen, that author will lose standing over time based on the direction Google seems to be heading.

I think Google is more clear than we often want to believe. I think it requires a lot of reading and searching and testing. Most are not willing to go to the lengths necessary to attain the skill sets or knowledge. those who do, will likely make a lot of money going forward.

Best, Thanks for your input.

[RobertFisher]

Carlos,

I like your voice of reason.

If all will look at Dr. Pete's data, it is obvious that many who are saying they dropped due to this are not looking at all the details. Given what he is showing, roughly 3 to 4% of EMD's may have dropped. Oddly, that would seem a bit high based on Matt Cutts saying roughly .6% of queries affected, but usually there are certain verticals hit harder than others.

I have met few people who say, "Yeah, my site doesn't have good content and i stuck a bunch of keywords in." I have had potential clients say, "I wrote it." when asked about their home page content, and then done a search to find everyone in their industry had stolen that content to the letter!

I think we are pretty strong in a lot of areas at my firm; I can go to any site we have built, SEO'd, etc. and find something i do not like on any given day. Why, because this SEO stuff is not easy. It takes patience and diligence.

Great comments and answers Carlos.

[RobertFisher]

James,

First, as to "... it seems many other people have faced the same." I would disagree. When you read Dr. Pete's post, few sites/pages were impacted.

Carlos makes a great point: EMD is not a penalty. In fact, it would be surprising if the EMD update would cause a site to fall say ten places (e.g. from #5 pg 1 to #15 pg 2). If it did, it would be more surprising if that fall was not for the exact match keyword. So, if I own monkeysuits.com and am ranked #2 for monkey accessories, there should be little impact from this one change on monkey accessories. But, I may feel some impact if monkey suits is a keyword that is a moneymaker for me.

If you read Dr. Pete's post : Googles EMD Algo Update - Early Data, , you will see that based on tracking EMD's over time, the change in the impact of EMD's was around 10%. From his data, out of 1,000 EMD's tracked, a net of about 3.5% of domains were impacted but :

Across our data set of 1000 SERPs, 41 EMDs fell out of the Top 10 (5 new EMDs entered, so the net change was 36 domains). Please note that we can’t prove that a domain lost ranking due to the algorithm change –

When you read further you will see additional details around the ones that lost the ranking. Many had somewhat less than optimal content. (I'm paraphrasing). When you read Matt Cutt's tweet (no opinion here on whether or not he is really Darth Vader, just reporting a tweet.): "Small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results."

So, if you feel you have been impacted, the way I would deal with it is to evaluate all else and make the appropriate changes. Do you have good quality content that you created? Have you over used keywords?, etc. If so, make the changes and track the rise in rankings.

Unfortunately, in the SEO world, we have no easy days with easy answers. Too much changes too fast. But, i have learned that if I latch onto the first "obvious" reason for a negative result, I waste time in finding the correct reason. No, not all the time. Sometimes it is the first. But, many times it is the third or fourth or a combination of factors that affect a site.

Hope this helps you out a bit.

Robert

[Quime]

It is a shame Google never make it clear what they mean by 'low quality content' as I believe like many others the content on my effected sites were of a high standard, i.e informative, well written, updated etc. There also appears to be different levels of EMD - regards how many key words they contain, how many dashes, if they are .com .net etc.

Also the age, authority, page rank of the site might have a bearing.

With this is mind if a site gets wiped off at what point should someone try to recover it, obviously if a few positions are lost its fine, if its below page 100 then it probably requires a different response.

I would say from reading people's comments from the last week that many people have dropped several pages simply due to the EMD update.

[Carlos-R]

I still think that the solution is the same as to many of the problems with Panda and Penguin. I own several EMD's and for most of them I still continue to rank relatively well.

I did drop 2 to 7 positions for pretty much all my competitive keywords after the update, which is what you'd expect to happen after the update. For the EMD's that have dropped from page 1 to 9 there is usually another reason behind it.

The way I see it my websites no longer get that automatic extra boost that comes with an EMD, and I need to work harder like non EMD's normally do.

This is an on-going discussion, I'm sure we'll have many different views to the problem.

[Quime]

I wouldn't agree >Carlos, Google officially say they are changing the weight given to EMDs, 'tweaking' the algorithm. But if you read people's comments on the results it seems quite widespread and many people's sites with good content they have worked hard on and rely on as a business have simply disappeared. It is not the case that SERPS have been mildly re-adjusted, but in many case disappeared all together, for all SERPS.

When the effect is like this it renders a person's business useless. In that case should they blindly look for good links, improve content for a non disclosed google set of 'rules' and try to please google, without even knowing what they did wrong in the first place regarding content.

In some cases the fastest way to recover the business (not the URL) might be to start a new URL, move the site and start linking. If the site was not so established before, this would probably be the fastest solution in many case, instead of waiting patiently in case google change their minds.

[Carlos-R]

EMD is not really a penalty. Look at it this way; before the update because you had an exact match domain Google gave you 10 points, after the update Google has reduced that number to 3 points. You simply have lost the advantage you had of owning an exact match domain.

Moving the content to a new URL won't help you at all, what you need to do is continue to build high quality links, write great content, improve social interactions with your website, etc. (nothing new)