How to Recover from the Exact Match Domain Update last weekend?
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Hi,
Our main website a geo exact match city dot com domain which is 18 years old got all its rankings washed away from top ten to 300th to 400th position plus on Google.
We are still top 10 on Yahoo and Bing for the City term.
The site is Dmoz listed , has quality updated daily content and no paid advertising or links of any kind.
I joined seomoz today and noticed I via the page optimiser that the main keyword for the city which is the exact match domain was over optimised but its hard to talk about events and news in a city without mentioning the citys name lol
Looking at the backlinks in the open site explorer tool I noticed alot of spammy links from chinese website and weird domains that were not related and am beginning to think I was the victim of a negative seo campaign.
I submitted a re-consideration request with Google and they replied in the space of a few days saying that it was not a manual penalty and that it was down to there algorithm changing or perhaps I changed cms or made changes.
There was no unatural links warning either.
Funny thing is the website is wordpress based and we changed to a new theme 2 weeks ago and also moved to a new server.
Just wondering people views on what my next move shoud be to try and regain our rankings on Google
I already toned down the use of the city keyword on the homepage.
Regards
Tom
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Vladimir,
in regards of redirecting 301. Which 301 do we set, temporary or permanent 301?
Thanks,
George.
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Mabe it wasn't an EMD update, there was Penguin refresh on October 5th so it may be the reason of ranking decrease. You should review webmaster guidelines to see if you made bad links.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
However, if you are sure it was an EMD update you can do this:
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Buy new domain
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Do 301 redirect from old to new domain (that will redirect all your backlinks)
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Do normal redirect (that will redirect traffic)
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Login to Google Webmaster Tools and find option to move site to other domain
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