Sept. 27, 2012 Google Update
A lot of Hubbers have asked about Google's EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update unrolled on September 27, 2012, since traffic on this site started to drop on September 28.
However, there is no way the EMD update could be impacting Hubpages traffic, for reasons I'll explain below. What hit most of us is the unrelatedPanda 20 update.
However, if you've got your ownwebsites, with keywords in your domain name, the EMD update might affect your traffic. So let's explore what exactly Google's EMD update does.
[Update July 2013: Our Hubpages usernames do double duty assubdomains, for example: greekgeek.hubpages.com. If Google considers subdomains to be part of domain names, then a Hubpages account like http://usedcars.hubpages.com may have ranked better for the query "used cars" before the EMD update and suffered traffic loss afterwards. Read on to learn why.]
What IS an Exact Match Domain Name?
The Exact Match Domain update only looks at domain names like wikipedia.comor hubpages.com or buy-organic.com. It doesn't care about the individual webpage's name. It's not going to ding you for calling your hub www.obvious.com/how-to-open-a-can-of-spinach.
I have not heard any examples of the EMD update targeting subdomains, either. So if your Hubpages username is "travelguide," and your travel articles are all filed under travelguide.hubpages.com, I don't think you need to worry.
So, What Does the EMD Update DO?
Matt Cutts, Google Spokespundit, actually gave us a warning about EMD back in March 2011 in this Webmaster Help Video.
Matt said:
“We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it.”
A keyword domain is a domain name which contains a search term or search phrase you're trying to rank for. For instance, before the EMD update went into effect, perfect-omelette.com might've helped you get your website to the top of search results for people looking up "how to make a perfect omelette."
Take a close look at what I bolded in Matt's statement. That implies the EMD update is not trying to apply a penalty to sites that use keywords in domain names. Rather, it's just taking away the advantage that a keyword in domain names used to give a website.
If the website has good content on that subject, and good backlinks recommending it as an authority site for that topic, its rankings may hold steady!
We get a little more information about the EMD update from a patent that Google was granted late last year, talking about how some companies try to "trick" it into ranking their websites better by using an exact-match domain name. The patent discusses ways to weed out such tricks so as not to give a bad site advantages over one with better content.
Some Victims of the EMD Update
teethwhitening.org is one of the sites that lost ranking to the EMD update. Take a look at that page and you'll see why Google thought that perhaps it wasn't what people searching for "teeth whitening" are looking for.
SEOmoz reports several examples of sites hit by EMD: purses.org,playscrabble.net, bmicalculatormale.com, charterschools.com. As you can see, each domain name was a search phrase the site was trying to rank for. Each domain dropped from the front page of Google results for their search term, some only falling back a page or two, others by many pages, depending on how poor the site's actual content was.
In the comments of the Searchengineland post announcing the EMD update, a number of respondents complained about their high-quality websites being hit. Some may be legitimate gripes, while others may be seeing their sites through rose-tinted glasses, or mistaking the impact of the EMD update for the hard-hitting but unrelated Panda 20 Update that happened the next day.
The Exact Match Domain Update Hardly Hurts gives us a little concrete information (worth reading, if you're interested in this sort of thing).
So What Should I Do If I Have an Exact Match Domain?
The exact match domain is not going to cause active harm to your website. It justwon't help your site rank better.
So if the domain name was the only thing propping your site up in search results, and your site dropped in Google rankings, you'll simply have to find other ways to create effective, useful, kickass posts related to that topic. Earn your rankings with the book's content, not just its cover.
See the link below for some ways to improve your site.
I Lost Traffic Sept 28, But My Website Isn't an Exact Match Domain!
Yep. That was Panda 20, unrolled September 28-30. That's a totally separate part of Google's algorithm which attempts to evaluate the quality of content across an entire domain, assign the domain a rating, then use that rating to boost or downrank pages from that domain in Google's search results.
There's only so much you can do, if you're publishing on a multi-user website like Hubpages, to recover from Panda. However, if you think your own website was hit, it's worth reading Google's guide to what Panda is looking for as a checklist of possible ways to improve content.
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