New EMD site ranking #3 with no link building

A couple months ago I did an experiment and built five one-page niche sites. Here's how I set them up:

• Low-competition keywords with 1000-5000 global exact matches
• .com or .net domain containing full keyword
• Standard off-the-shelf WordPress theme from ElegantThemes
• One article of around 400-500 words (outsourced to TextBroker at the time, now I have a VA for this sort of thing)
• Keyword used only 2-3 times an article, including variations
• 2-3 relevant external links in article
• No link building or off-page SEO

After 60 days, four of the five sites aren't doing jack, but one has moved up to #3 in Google.

It took about a month for this to happen. For the last 30 days the site has averaged 17 visitors/day. Before that, it was getting 0-3 visitors/day. The site briefly jumped up to #2 for a couple days, but has seemed to settle in at #3.

It's a three-word keyword with 4,400 global exact matches and 3,600 US exact matches. Competition is pretty light, but not non-existent. My site is #3 in this chart:



CTR has been around 4.5% and the site made $15 from AdSense over the last 30 days.

The end result is that the only site that did well had an exact match .com domain with no extra words. So if the keyword was (for example) "gerbil breeding," the winning domain name was gerbilbreeding.com. The non-performing sites were .net domains or had names like gerbilbreedingguide.com.

Five sites isn't enough to draw any hard conclusions, and I realize that there's a lot more to a site's success than the domain name. But based on this experiment, it's possible that having a perfect match .com helps way more than I used to think it did.

My next project will be to create five exact match .com sites. I'll report on them after a couple months.

Also, since I now have four sites that are basically dead in the water, I'm going to blast the shit out of them with Fiverr gigs and see what happens...

I wouldn't loose too much energy on EMDs with Google kicking the shit out of EMDs nowadays.

krifa said:

I wouldn't loose too much energy on EMDs with Google kicking the shit out of EMDs nowadays.

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Right but the point is that the site is still ranking on the 3rd result as of today. It's been about a week since the EMD update rolled out and should be settling out by now.

Agreed. I also have some EMD's that are responding well to edu links.

ja1myn said:

Right but the point is that the site is still ranking on the 3rd result as of today. It's been about a week since the EMD update rolled out and should be settling out by now.

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thedorf said:

Agreed. I also have some EMD's that are responding well to edu links.

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Has anyone else found a way to resurrect EMD sites that have plummeted in rankings? If so, I would love to see a thread started with details of how it was achieved.

mrankin said:

Has anyone else found a way to resurrect EMD sites that have plummeted in rankings? If so, I would love to see a thread started with details of how it was achieved.

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i second that.

Maybe not yet but soon it will be taken down for sure.Google is killing all the EMDs.

maybe your site have good content, if not its can hurt by google update

As you go further you can expect more and more opportunities. You really do have patience.

you need to build more content fro that one domain and build baclinks...

else it will go away...

Similar thing happened to me, bought a domain last week, using a basic wordpress site and sitting at 4th with no SEO work done to it.

I have had emd sites front page on google within 2 weeks with no linkbuilding, so it can happen.. Recently a lot of people had their shitty websites slapped because they were over optimised low content emd's and I had a few penalized as well.....but some of my other emds that are of a high quality have actually risen. Google are trying to slap poor sites and 90% of emds are low hanging fruit for them but it doesnt mean that a good site will necessarily be penalised for no reason.

It seems your site is good quality and has relevant content, so Google judged it deserves to be on the first page. This kind of sites can rank high with minimal link building, or no link building at all in extreme cases... However, are you sure you don't have any kind of links to your site? Maybe someone liked one of your articles and put a link to it in his or her authority blog - those kind of links are very powerful.

krifa said:

I wouldn't loose too much energy on EMDs with Google kicking the shit out of EMDs nowadays.

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EMD is an EMD if you give backlinks to the site with EMD keyword. EMD is not an EMD if you give backlinks with other keywords/multiple one. You need to execute brain.exe here.

EMDs will stay like it Google or not... today. Its all circle runs with G. Why, o why, when I think of Google I see the Matt Cutts' face.

I do agree with OP, you can rank an EMD with light offpage in a low-mid competition niche.
Good share sean3000. I will add, based on my experience, it does not matter .com, I had similar success with other TLD's as long as they are EMD

mrankin said:

Has anyone else found a way to resurrect EMD sites that have plummeted in rankings? If so, I would love to see a thread started with details of how it was achieved.

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It's hard to say as it's still early. I've found that even some EMDs with hundreds of pages of content were nailed by the update, so I'm guessing on page content isn't a factor.

What is the site about?

With what you said, all 5 just be #1 on Google...specially if you don't do link building...