On Septemper 28th, 2012, Google rolled out a new penalty. The stated target of the penalty was exact match domains, particularly lower quality websites created for the purpose of targeting specific keywords. Google’s contention is that these sites represent unnatural search results, and that they are not truly “organic” results.
According to Google, the update only affected 0.6% of rankings. However, by empirical evidence rocketing through the forums and the SEO community at large, it is affecting a far greater sampling. This is a great example of the partial truthfulness of Google. While the exact match domain portion of the algorithmic update may have only affected .6, the update seems to have targeted low quality sites on non-EMD domains as well.
Search engine optimization through My Favorite Web Designs has evolved over the years. Many of the tactics which worked only a year ago are now an invitation to being penalized or deindexed. This makes many in the field wonder “what does the future of SEO look like now?” and “Is SEO Dead?”.
The answer is that the future actually looks very bright for the SEO community who has proper strategies in place. In fact, this will ultimately result in more American SEO dollars being spent on the creation of useful content instead of the running of spam machines of yesteryear.
Another of the winners is the My Favorite Web Designs search engine optimization consumer. The new methods of SEO promote investment into social media properties, which is a much more enduring form of SEO, and valuable in its own right.
The last winner we’ll look at is the operators of start up web ventures. In the past, SEO companies would have spent big bucks automating spam for each web 2.0 or social media enterprise, reducing the sites effectiveness by diluting it with useless comments and posts linking back to their site. These updates heavily favor sites that promote better content.
In examining my own clients, and looking through countless posts on the internet, I have formed my own conclusions on the causes of the EMD Penalty, and the best routes forward now that the SEO penalty has been incurred.
1. Build social media. Make sure you have a NAP(Name, Address, Phone Number) exact match on your social media. Use OGP, Twitter Cards And Microdata to hook your site to your social properties. Link to your social properties from your site. Get connections from users in your local area (No purchasing on fiverr, foreign and irrelevant IPs do not help).
3. Vary your anchor text – this applies to links on and offsite.
4. If you have any links from really low quality domains, disavow them with Google Webmaster Tools.
5. Use Google Analytics to cull your content. This is easier than you think, do not be intimidated. Go to the content section in analytics, and look for the average time on page, and the bounce rate. For pages that can be improved, improve them. For pages that cannot, redirect them. For pages that have duplicate by useful content, work on combining them, or set up an experiment using analytics to determine the best content for conversions. For pages that get no visits, rework your keywords or redirect them if there is a page they can be part of.
6. Part of improving pages is looking at page length, how stale the content is, adding rich media, embedded media, and other interesting items, such as links to useful resources and infographics.
The last word I will leave you with is the doomed domain effect. This is a scenario where you have worked diligently to increase the quality, and yet your penalty seems to barely go off. Perhaps you manage to achieve some small amount of traffic, but not what you wanted. This may be time to jump ship on your domain. Another instance where this is useful is when it is a brand new site and you are not yet heavily invested in the domain.
If you are asking yourself whether you should change the domain, consider the following: to prevent penalties, we are establishing brand. Brand is the reason people give you trust, and a big part of the reason search engines give you trust. To build brand, your domain should likely match your company name pretty closely, without being long or too many words. So if your domain is just random keywords, then perhaps switching to a branded domain would be a good move, and you can always 301 the old site.
Published By:
My Favorite Web Designs – Joshua Jacoby
10345 E Talameer Ave
Mesa, AZ 85212
Office: 480-335-1330
Email: Josh@myfavoritewebdesigns.com
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