Google hammers exact match domain owners!

Not another car boot market opening up?

And I think that is where the problem lies, there is no competition for Google so they a free to do whatever they want without any consequences to themselves. As for Bing and Yahoo they seem to be nothing else other than like angel and pilot fish that eat a sharks leftovers. Maybe R Branson should stick his finger into another pie...

Dam...back to the drawing board...

Many individuals similar to us, have misread the update about EMD. Here's what Matt Cutt's had posted over his Twitter profile :


Agree, he referred to the term exact match. But did someone actually check the results after the update was rolled out (though I'm sure most of us might have), but I'm not too sure how many did actually notice the sites that faced a drop in its rankings.

According to my observations, the sites that had majority of its backlinks pointing from exact match generic search phrases impacted the most. Now, why did this happen? Well, many site's adopted a style where they registered new domains with exact match keywords and search phrases and pointed links from them to their main websites. Why ? merely to manipulate the search engine algo.

Now, when Google realized this grey hat technique, they set a filter where all such unnaturally linked websites would be filtered out and not shown in the SERPs.

Do you all think that Google did something wrong by releasing this update ? C'mon guys I'm curious to know your feedback

Sorry, that isn't grey hat that is black hat.

Deliberate manipulation of serps through artificial structures is black hat, no debate, and at the mercy of Google's algo changes.

No the problem lies in that they created a structure that was open to dishonest manipulation, and they realised that that dishonest manipulators would eventually kill their business with inappropriate search results, and if they didn't do anything about then they would die.

The so called SEO industry bought this on themselves, Google didn't do it to them they responded to it.

It is rather like credit card fraud before chip and pin, the banks created chip and pin because of the fraudster, becuase if they didn't no one would trust credit cards any more.

Google has tons of competition, it is just they are a long way ahead of most of them. One slip (let too much spam through) and the competition will be down their throats. They know that.

I don't think any one would dispute this is an issue if sites are gaming the results as you describe. It's more of an issue with collateral damage, ie sites that aren't gaming.

Personally, I think cleaning up the index is a good thing, and the aims of Panda, Penguin and the EMD updates is going the right direction, but unfortunately the "one size fits all" methodology doesn't always work.

A very good point. In wars there tends to be collateral damage. Google is at war with black hat manipulators.

The problem is that its going to take a lot more than those three algos to get them all. Look at Facebook and Twitter for instance. First I think it was Twitter that started targeting the bad apples, and not too long after that Facebook went after sites that promoted a "likes exchange". Using coins or all manner or paraphernalia to get people to use their systems. Even while that was going on, people were selling links, alexa reviews, facebook likes, twitter followers (and retweets). Now facebook is getting rid of the fake likes.

My only hole in this theory is that from the beginning, from the inception of these ideas, they never realized what the worst case scenario would be if their systems were abused. If they did, maybe we'd have less black hatters out there. But now it seems more to me like a mop up operation than spam prevention or clean up. They're working harder now to keep the net clean than they would have if they took better precautions when they started out.

(IMHO)

Fyi. before the algo. hit websites it was Grey hat, it's now a Black Hat


Well said.

Every search engine as we all know works with one core intention viz. to offer the most relevant and appropriate search results. So be it Google, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook or any other, if they don't return the right results to a search query it's a failure and users would soon start loosing interest. The best way out with keeping yourself safe from any algo update is stay genuine and deliver something that adds value to the visitors. After all search engines follow people, if people like it, you have no reason to bother about anything.

Atleast I follow this principle, I'm not sure if others feel and think that way.

Forgive me, but I must respectfully disagree here. BH has always been the same, regardless of the time an algo came out. It hasn't changed.

There are some gray areas, yes, but the sites Google are targeting are actively building links, creating link wheels, creating more and more EMD sites, pointing them to each other or their "money site", and just so that they can get their sites to rise in the serps. 90% of the time these sites have little or no high quality content, loaded with spam, and all so that they can make money from it. They then augment this with all sorts of automated software. This is what Google is against. It leads to people finding low quality and sometimes dangerous sites and the user takes longer to find what they need.

What we do on forums, creating signature links, exchanging links (that have been properly no-followed according to Google standards), is the grey area.

The only real problems are the actual bona fide sites that have brilliant content on them, with little to no suspicious inbound links, that are taking the flack for it as well.

(As usual, IMHO)