Wow, some sites I monitor have been obliterated. Matt Cutts is definitely full of shit with his tweet.

Code:

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.

Reduce in search my ass. Some sites have gone from page one to page 30+. This is a fucking penalty because there is no fucking way Google ever gave that much weight to exact match domains. No fucking way. Matt Cutts is a lying sack of shit.

To illustrate how lame this update is, I have a friend that owns an auto repair shop. His website is "LASTNAME Auto." From page one to nowhere. What the fuck is that shit about Matt Cutts? What, people can't have an exact match domain for their damn legally registered business name? Let me guess, my friend should set down his tools and build a 500 page website and jerk off on Facebook all day engaging users instead of turning the wrenches that make him and his employees money. Google is flat out destroying the online presence of small businesses.

Ironically, I do have an EMD that rose to number one. It's an authority site and gets most of its traffic from direct visits and referrals. It's well branded and would survive just fine if Google's servers crashed and never returned. And from the bullshit Google has been pulling lately, that would be the best thing for consumers and a "free to innovate" internet in the future.

That's it. I'm moving to BING.

Originally Posted by AlphaUA

Another senseless update from google.
Today I lost 2 sites:
1. EMD, blog, 6 month old, 27 posts, new 500 word post is added every week
2. Non-EMD, online store, 5 YEARS old, more than 300 products

There is nothing common between these two sites: different ip, server, age, platform, purpose.
I have hypothesis that google has some random values in their algorythm to confuse those who doing SEO. I just dont have another explain to what happens

This article regarding "rank modifying" may be of interest to you...

http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/08/g...comment-453199

an authority site went form #5 to nothing (40,000 keywords per month)

Thank You Google

lol 6 of my sites have dissapeared completely, one is now sitting at 108 and one has gone from 1 to 9.

my main one disapeared, just came back right now in position 4.

EMDs took a hit, nowhere to be seen. And I first though it was just Serpbook acting up...

I'm in the same boat with everyone else saw around 30 of my sites blow up. But I have seen 2 sites that went from Top 10 to 0 coming back in the past hour into the Top 10. Hope this trend continues.

Going to take the weekend off, have a few drinks and try to relax while the dust settles.

My EMD got fucking hit! It's PR3 and had about 60 articles on it, and I constantly add! This cannot be happening...

The worse part is that I see a bunch of other EMD's in that niche still up there.

Are you guys doing adsense on them?

This is a nice wake up call for a lot of ppl who thinks their content is "high quality" or that their website is an "authority" site.

Originally Posted by virginpose

Going to take the weekend off, have a few drinks and try to relax while the dust settles.

That's my mentality today too mate. I'm sick of thinking about it. Gonna watch some footy, have a few pints and forget about it all until Monday.

Originally Posted by creativepotion

Are you guys doing adsense on them?

Adsense sites seem ok. But something I definitely want to look into is dumping all Google products (including Adsense) and pursuing new revenue opportunities such as http://www.cnbc.com/id/49193138/Yaho...tising_Revenue

No adsense here on any of my sites.

And in reply to the drinking bunch, let me join ya'll!

Originally Posted by Adam718

My EMD got fucking hit! It's PR3 and had about 60 articles on it, and I constantly add! This cannot be happening...

The worse part is that I see a bunch of other EMD's in that niche still up there.

EMD actually rose - from 9 to 3

All of my EMD are still rock solid at #1

uhh my authority sites are also gone - min. 15000-25000 words on each site :/

well lets wait a few days...

Its too early to tell anything about this, as with every update its going to take atleast 2 weeks for things to get back to normal.

continue writing quality content, continue commenting on social sites about your keyword.

profit.

Originally Posted by Gorush

uhh my authority sites are also gone - min. 15000-25000 words on each site :/

well lets wait a few days...

I said that about penguin too.. still waiting!

Wonder if they will roll out the same update to non US/Eng searches, what do you think?

Of course they will.

Originally Posted by Rua999

I said that about penguin too.. still waiting!

Originally Posted by googlemonster

All I can find anymore is ehow ehow ehow livestrong livestrong livestrong, youtube youtube youtube ehow ehow

Yes i m also seeing this. Apart from this yahoo answers, answers etc... All bullshit results.

Originally Posted by Knoxgates

Yes i m also seeing this. Apart from this yahoo answers, answers etc... All bullshit results.

And plenty of eBay listings with search query strings/tags too (product+name+here)

Originally Posted by longtimedead

Its too early to tell anything about this, as with every update its going to take atleast 2 weeks for things to get back to normal.

continue writing quality content, continue commenting on social sites about your keyword.

profit.

It will take 2 weeks to get stable and another 2 weeks when we implement new techniques and then in the next 2 weeks a new algo will come up and the cycle continues..

Admit it!! Google is sick!

anyone checked 'make money online' yet? number 1 is a youtube vid and number 3 is a press release lol

Originally Posted by rankjuice

anyone checked 'make money online' yet? number 1 is a youtube vid and number 3 is a press release lol

LMFAO, YT video 4 weeks long and 2 press releases

One of my sites that wasn't an EMD seems to have gotten hit. I had one page that was consistently #3-5 promoting a clickbank offer. Site has about 15 pages of well written content. Most articles are 700+ words and informative.

Checked results today and all pages that were ranking are nowhere to be found.

Now the first page is filled with youtube and video links which are only stupid affiliate promo videos. Two of the top 5 are press releases promoting an affiliate offer. So basically they took my site which was very informative about the subject with only 1 page promoting the offer the rest were just info articles and they replaced it with crappy videos, other crappy sites, and a crappy PR.

Google is just getting worse and worse when it comes to searches. I've actually started using Bing more now but they suck too.

To the drawing board, everyone. We gotta find a way to unpenalize EMD's.

Just tried to search a keyword which i was ranking #2 since last 3 months. The site is nowhere now. Here are the results i found on page 1.

1. Yahoo answers
2. Prlog
3. yahoo answers
4. Youtube
5. Ehow
6. Livestrong
7. Yahoo answers
8. answers.com

These are completely shit results.

Checked 2 domains:
1) keyword.org from position #1 to away (US keyword)
2) keyword-blabla.it from position #18 to away (Italian keyword)
WTF???
In this time with the first domain I lose about 100$/d LOL

I dunno what ppl are saying here. the update already works on non US searches.. I have a site which got good traffic from UK CA AU.. all gone

My 50 quality pages site got dropped on all keywords while a site which is probably built last month ranks 2 now, with 2 lame spammy pages. so to all those who says "you think you have authority and quality site" I say wake up. if the sites that outranked me are better then mine then I must be blind..

It also seems some ranking are dancing up and down.. some keywords went from page 1 to nowhere then back to page 1.. the update needs time to stable.. but I'm already sure it sux

Australian search results still showing tons and tons of exact match domains. None have moved so it looks like G has yet to start kicking my competition out of the serps.

Getting the popcorn ready!

Looks google not have idea what emd really suit needs for most of webmasters. it easy to remember, complete micro niche explanation, nice and like everywhere not all is spammers(! - what google love to forget!). Low quality in google eyes can mean anything, it can be just algorithmic error we will never know about, it completely nontransparent system without clean rules.
That what we spended lot of time on emd site, researching (keywords, content, etc), paying for content, stock images, domain & hosting, created unique premium content - for google mean nothing, them just on war with emd domains.

Also how i see now lot of small business websites is not possibly to find under their brand names. So looks like very soon google will start law games with small business owners.

everything i see now how google methodically killing their serp. It not about spammers, it mostly about kids who find a big red button and playing with it.
Quality of their serps going down with every update, that wikipedia/ehow/livestrong is just content farms but it ranks everywhere. Even youtube is just a content farm, but since it google property...

Google show 10 search results from one domain, it clear signal what not enough sites (which still not penalized) to display, but still increasing power of their penalization weapon. So looks it not a 'web search engine' now, it searching only few sites and looking for way to penalize all other websites.

What will be next? Google search engine for youtube and wikipedia only with ads in all other organic result places? Ok, please but tell us clear about it what google is NOT real search engine anymore.

All 3 sites that were affected were non-emds.
Content on the sites was handwritten by myself, and not from outside sources, with at least weekly updates.

Similar sites (same theme, same content level) are fine...

Wow, about 50% of my sites have disappeared completely. The weird part is that they have attacked sites that weren't low quality at all. For example

My main forum - It isn't even coming up anywhere for its name anymore. Its not even a keyword that I targeted, but I would expect it's name to bring it up.

One health site of mine - Wasn't spammy at all and contains a ton of useful information. Seems to have disappeared...

Very weird update

Matt Cunts is watching and getting a good laugh as he trolls here im sure. What gets me, this guys seems to get off on his own fame and fortune posting to twitter like anyone really cares about what he has to say. If there weren't so many idiots visiting his site and following his tweets maybe he would stop acting like a fool and just get on with the job. Instead, he wants his 5mins.

What's likely happened is that the latest algo plus robots make it easier to flag a supposedly thin EMD, after which it gets manually deranked (some Cutts drone just flicks a switch and the list of suspected sites get flushed to page nowhere). Google is abandoning SEO, or at least a monolithic set of rules applying to all sites, and enforcing (again, inconsistently) "natural authority optimization" by rewarding sites that collectively have naturally derived authority with the optimal rankings. This scheme thus tries to cut out all the traditional tricks for artificially attaining authority (buying aged domains, high PR backlinks, etc), leaving only the YouTubes, WebMDs and eBays as the sites holding true natural authority.

Bing is not the answer. It's advised to try working on mastering the ways to exploit the internal search engines of major websites (Amazon, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, et al) to steer traffic to your sites, as an alternative to general search engines, who are plainly now gaming us harder than we are them.

I had a PR4 and a PR3 hit. The PR4 was not an exact match and it had 80 pages of American college student written content. The PR3 was not exact either and had 100 pages of American college student written content.

Yet, all of the old EMDs that I have abandoned over a year ago with Indian written content stayed the same or increased rank...

Those 2 sites were HEAVILY penalized too. They were ranking for a few 100k exact keywords and now they are just gone for everything.

Originally Posted by jdmarket

I had a PR4 and a PR3 hit. The PR4 was not an exact match and it had 80 pages of American college student written content. The PR3 was not exact either and had 100 pages of American college student written content.Yet, all of the old EMDs that I have abandoned over a year ago with Indian written content stayed the same or increased rank...Those 2 sites were HEAVILY penalized too. They were ranking for a few 100k exact keywords and now they are just gone for everything.

looks like google is not 'high quality' anymore. it becoming a low quality search engine since start of 2012, because of hard work of google knowledge serp spammers web team.

Has anyone who lost rankings seen it come back? I'm just curious to know if there's hope...

So far none of my EMD or any other of my 40 sites have been hit. keeping fingers crossed it stays that way.

Been hit on a variety of sites. Google traffic down to hardly any across a range of sites. Some are EMDs but others I wouldn't class as EMDs because I don't target the domain name as a keyword, rather the domain names are just relevant to the niche. Thing is, I've also been hit for more branded domains too. These sites are mostly price comparison sites which Google have always said they're happy with. Totally shafted in all areas. Let's just hope things are still changing........

Cheers.
Fat Dad

Originally Posted by The Web Designer

That's it. I'm moving to BING.

I did that back in 2004 when Adsense was born and when they went IPO. I knew this would happen. Google was going to stop worrying about user experience and satisfy their profits and investors.

People laughed at me and saying I was an idiot for targeting MSN/Live/Bing. Everytime Google did an update, never affected me. 98% of my income comes from them. I may be losing a lot of money doing it this way, but atleast I can sleep at night.

With Google you can go bankrupt overnight, literally. No company should be able to do that without some kind of oversight. Google needs to be regulated, they have way too much power and influence.

Same here in the UK, around 60% of EMD's hit though, touch wood, so far only losing a matter of positions not pages. Mix of crap sites and quality sites hit, 20+ page sites hit, custom themes, 4star textbroker content.

EDIT - Also seeing quite a few EMD's unaffected, i presume google deems these "quality" enough, even though they are of the exact same standard as those hit.

Originally Posted by ryannull

With Google you can go bankrupt overnight, literally. No company should be able to do that without some kind of oversight. Google needs to be regulated, they have way too much power and influence.

I disagree,
Google should not be regulated, but their algorithm should be exposed and accessible to all those interested in finding out how it works.
When it deals with information suppression the government has a role (constitutionally) to ensure that such information retrieval actually attempts to give the best answer to a question, not the one that Google's "paid the most" to display