Did Penguin Wipe Out EMDs?

twilightofidols

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Has anyone noticed a lot of EMD's disappear from the search results? I have been doing some research in the SERPs to try to find out why google favored the sites that it did, and why mine was penalized. I notice increasingly that more non-EMD-brand sites are ranking well above the EMD's that previously dominated.

I'm sure a lot of SEOs out there have been trying to research the effects of this update, and for all we know Google is still tweaking the algo but this seems to be evident to me for the most part across the board.

Do your observations of recent SERP changes in your keywords show similar results? Or perhaps it is far too soon to confirm or deny this observation across the board.
 
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My EMD site for a local niche fell from the top positions in Google to the bottom half of the first page. I am not sure if EMD was part of the over optimization factors that Google has now put into place.
 
Google didn't wipe out EMDs, it's just that EMDs are a favorite of BHers, so they took a disproportionate hit. EMDs are more likely to have BH on-and-offsite seo, nothing to do with the EMD itself.
 
Google didn't wipe out EMDs, it's just that EMDs are a favorite of BHers, so they took a disproportionate hit. EMDs are more likely to have BH on-and-offsite seo, nothing to do with the EMD itself.

Yes this is what I mean by "wipe out" single out EMDs for a greater penalty than non-EMDs
 
I can see a few EMD's ranking on 1st page. But they have wiped out 2-3 page EMD's
 
Well I'll look at it this way:

Half of my EMDs fell 1-6 pages.
The other half rose the same amount for some ridiculous terms.

All I'm doing is making more links and working harder than ever.
 
Reading some other threads, small sites had the home page wiped out. The reason seems to be link building to the home page. They reported that some long tails on other pages survived. I suspect no link building was done to those other pages.

So I don't think this is an EMD issue. Just issue with thin sites, and link building to that particular page - maybe too aggressive, maybe blasting the tier 1, a continuation of the "google unnatural links penalty"...
 
I know one person I talk to everyday had his emd/root wiped out. I asked how much he linked to the ROOT instead of inners, he said 90%. Pretty much solved that in my head. When you have emd, you prob think to link massively to that one page with exact anchor and screw the deeps. Prob just the links effecting it again IMO.
 
I'm sure there isn't a simple answer to this question. Search for "python hosting" and you'll see what I mean.
 
Reading some other threads, small sites had the home page wiped out. The reason seems to be link building to the home page. They reported that some long tails on other pages survived. I suspect no link building was done to those other pages.

So I don't think this is an EMD issue. Just issue with thin sites, and link building to that particular page - maybe too aggressive, maybe blasting the tier 1, a continuation of the "google unnatural links penalty"...

I just checked some of my longtails that I haven't built any links to and they all took a hit as well. I am sure it will come to light soon by some very smart SEOs some of the specific factors triggering this penalty. I read the google blog post where they specify exactly what they are targeting and I know that many sites out there who were hit are not guilty of factors mentioned by google. Obviously, many more factors will come to light in the next few weeks and months.
 
I know one person I talk to everyday had his emd/root wiped out. I asked how much he linked to the ROOT instead of inners, he said 90%. Pretty much solved that in my head. When you have emd, you prob think to link massively to that one page with exact anchor and screw the deeps. Prob just the links effecting it again IMO.

I can definitely see how this would be a factor, if google see's 5000 backlinks to your home page, and 0 backlinks to all your in-pages that would probably raise a red flag.
 
Then I guess there is a page penalty and site penalty - probably different but related. The good thing is that the community is hard at work on an answer (or answers), and after the dust settles, it will be more clear.

One thing is clear, and counter-intuitive. Google is penalizing sites for incoming links-which webmasters have no control over. I don't know if this lasts, but you should not be panalized for something a competitor can do to you.
 
Definately didn't wipe them out as i have a number of them still ranking, however, as others have said, its likely that a large % of EMDs are used by internet marketers and as such have "unusual" link profiles which is likely why they've been hit.
 
Forgive my poor knowledge, what is EMD? I am a beginner. Thanks a lot, guys.
 
my obs are clear. pushing people to use adwords. you are affected unless you are very big authority site.
 
For me certainly not. I have 4 EMD's which I set up in 2012, most of them bounced around the first and the second page but after penguin they are all in the top 5 now, and earning quite nicely. Most have about 5~ 1000 Word articles, videos and at least 3 pictures. As for my link building strategy I build a very high quality web 2.0 wheel with mostly unique articles and a diversication of 20~ different link types. I'm upscaling the method and am attempting to rank a new EMD within this month . As for direct backlinks, traffic travis tells me that I have 400~ backlinks pointing to my main page and 4484 Backlinks pointing to my inner pages. This is for my main site with the highest competition and visitors, its ranking #2
 
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I was #1 for a EMD domain with only one page .
My site is dancing to #2 - #5
for backlinks i had about 30% spam comments , 30% CP and blogs tiers, and 30% domains backlinks

My others EMD that were'nt first didn't move

waiting to learn more about penguin to take action ...
 
I still have an emd at pos 1 of 1.5 mill search so it can't be totally wiped out!
 
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