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Any of your blogs affected by Google EMD update? How to recover?

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In Monetization & SEO

The IndiBlogger forum is now a read-only archive. Every public discussion is still here to read, but new topics and replies are closed.

Tony John
from Kerala |

Google rolled out EMD update over the week end and webmaster forums are filled with complaints from webmasters and bloggers about losing traffic after the algo update. As usual, this algorithm update from Google comes with surprises for many bloggers. 

Did you check your traffic statistics? Is there any noticeable improvement or reduction in traffic from yesterday?

The previous changes where targetting low quality content and web spam and it was easy to recover by correcting the mistakes. This time, even though Google says the update deal with low quality sites, it actually affects the ranking of all blogs which were taking advantage of keywords in domain name.

Here is some interesting discussion about this Google algorithm update:

http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/webmasters/y4VsfZ7fo_c/discussion

Edited
Reason: Added link to Google forum

Replies 1 to 2 of 2

Prasad Np
from Delhi / Gurgaon |

i have just moved to my own domain www.desitraveler.com...about week ago and posted 3 posts after that.. how will it impact ? Earlier it was on blogspot.

Ranjith
from hyderabad |

The topic of discussion here is different. It is about EMD- Exact Match Domains. Say, for example, you google 'indiblogger'. The first result you see will probably be this site indiblogger.in because the query matches eactly with the domain name. taking advantage of this, some webmaster have registered domain names hosting sites purely meant for search engines. For example, if I create a site www.how-to-earn-money-easily.com, people searching for'How to earn money easily' would be shown my site as the first result since the domain name matches eactly. However, Google's anti spam team (or whatever you call it) has been tweaking their algorithms to handle such cases and the recent one was the EMD update meany to tackle this problem.

Coming to your site, if you have been receiving considerable tarffic from Google search in the past, then this traffic might come down for a few days or weeks because of shifting to the new domain. However, everything will return to normal in a month or so, under normal circumstances.

Tony John
from Kerala |

Prasad,

As Ranjith said, your domain change has nothing to do with EMD update from Google. However, if your previous blog was getting lot of traffic, there are lot of things to be taken care before you change your domain to avoid losing traffic. I myself burnt my fingers once and lost all the traffic when I moved to another domain. I have consolidated the lessons learnt from my own experience. You can read it here: http://www.techulator.com/resources/6294-Domain-Name-Change-Best-Practices-Checklist.aspx

The key point in that list is, make sure you file DMCA and get all content removed from search engines if others have copied your content. Otherwise, search engines may think your new site has copied articles from other sites since the new site hasn't built any reputation yet, even though the 301 redirect can help a bit.