share your thoughts on how to get your sites ranking again

[lethal0r]

I posted much of this on webmasterworld but I value peoples opinions on here highly, so i'd love some responses from you guys.

I have had 4 EMD websites hit with the -950 "somewhere really low in the SERPS" penalty.

I have had 1 non-EMD website hit with the -950 for its main terms, but survive for a few others.

I have had 1 EMD website survive unscathed.

after looking at my own sites at length I believe this is an over-optimization penalty which is keyword-based. i feel pretty certain on that, I dont think most people have been hit with an EMD penalty.

im not sure on whether the penalty is for on-page over-optimization, or link based. perhaps it is both. either would apply to my punished sites, where I have obviously targetted certain searches zealously, without doing anything approaching black hat. your typical site owner would not do this (or, at least google's ideal site owner wouldn't). I have a strong suspicion there is an issue with too many footer links and links not in sentences e.g. forum sigs.

the site that survived is 6 months old, has my best content and has some pretty decent backlinks. so either there is a few months grace period with regards the new penalty, or I have done something right here.

I feel the solution is within google's regularly repeated mantra "pretend google doesn't exist".

my strategy:

a) 301 one website to another domain, whilst also de-optimizing the content and improving the backlinks.

b) de-optimize another site, improve the backlinks.

c) leave the rest.

 

[philiporchard]

Genuine, natural links from sites with related content. It's that simple or difficult, depending on how you look at it.

 

[lethal0r]

Genuine, natural links from sites with related content. It's that simple or difficult, depending on how you look at it.

bloody difficult then!

 

[addz123]

I've pretty much given up greyhat SEO now and I'm just investing in long term, white hat solutions with social media traffic going forward.

I think playing catch-up with Google nowadays is too dangerous a game (i.e. trying to fix penalised sites). I'm guessing most sites will have been penalised for a reason (e.g. not enough high quality signals to Google) and you're hardly going to fix something by making chops and changes or 301'ing sites.

One of the things I'm doing to my penalised EMD gambling sites is de-indexing them and relaunching them on brand domains, then letting them age.

I genuinely now think that anyone with short-term goals in SEO, or 100% reliant on SEO traffic even with a high quality site, is going to suffer going forward.

When you look at the amount of updates google has introduced in the last 15 months (Penguin, Panda...up to Panda 4.0, EMD update, Search not Provided, more Sponsored Ads) you can clearly see where they are heading. Don't forget the engineers are working on another big penguin update, so forget about refreshes for now.

 

[Blossom]

Do you have webmaster tools installed? If so, did you receive any unnatural links messages?

 

[lethal0r]

Do you have webmaster tools installed? If so, did you receive any unnatural links messages?

nothing in webmaster tools for me.

 

[bermuda]

Well, that's an interesting case and you have somehow answered the question yourself. Quality content plus links will eventually pay off but I tend to disagree that all low ranks are penalties. You have mentioned that your ranks for some terms are around 950th position on Google, it does not directly imply presence of a penalty. As you know, there is a sort of invisible ranking filter, though many folks do not believe it, called Sandbox and some hot business terms demand longer optimization.

Exact match domains may not do magics in the cyberspace, and you can find so many websites at the top of Google for very competitive terms that do not have any of the targeted terms in their syntax of domain. I recommend you to be patient for some time, because I would call websites that are less than one year old just newcomer in the SEO world. Try finding some niche-specific directories and then have your web address listed at their most relevant pages, also keep your site updated.

 

[cc976a]

Is the generalized opinion that these penalties in late September are permanent - or changeable as you adapt and grow your site?

Will this be automatically added back in SERPs or need a manual request to Google?

 

[addz123]

I'm still waiting for the next EMD update and Penguin update before I can really draw conclusions.

From early analysis, it would appear as though the EMD update was based on a combination of optimisation based on your domain, on-page kw% and backlinks.

I really can't believe this update was based on quality because I have 2-3 low quality EMD sites (20-30 pages) that have virtually zero authority, zero social metrics and havn't been updated with content in over a year. Both of these sites survived.

On the other hand, I've had a few EMD sites that were higher quality, excellent user metrics (3+ mins on site), strong unique content, natural links and they got hit with the EMD update. It's possible that these sites were slightly over-optimised on the homepage with regards to the domain, which is why they were hit.

My other analysis saw that my older sites (1+ yr) didn't get hit by the EMD thing where as all my newer sites did. It's very interesting to hear your 6 month old EMD didn't get hit by the update as it shows it isn't just based on website age.

In any case, I've made a number of improvements to the sites that got hit so I'm just waiting to see if they come back in the next update.

 

[bougatsa]

One simple test you can do is run your website url through ahrefs.com or majesticseo.com and look at the anchor test distribution of your incoming links. A Healthy site's link profile has most incoming links with top anchor text distribution looking like:

Website name / brand name (150)
Http://websitename.com (40)
Websitename. (25)
Websitename.com (25)
Click here to visit website name (10)
Keyword phrase (5)
Etc

Over optimising sites look like this:

Keyword phrase 1 (150)
Keyword phrase 2 (75)
Website name (25)
Http://websitename.com (10)
Etc
Etc

If you suspect it's an over optimisation penalty, and you'll probably know yourself if you've been link building aggressively, then this quick check will probably highlight where your problem lies.

Ahrefs.com is excellent for this (i think you can do it with a free account).

 

[dashu1]

Why don't you have a read of the patent they've filed for the EMD filter.

What you'll probably find is that the EMD that wasn't hit has a very low number of searches per month for the phrase &/or very low number of adwords advertisers &/or is a phrase of low commercial intent.

While the others are the opposite.