So What Would You Do with an EMD?

I'm guessing the primary key phrase is obviously London Plumbers and your non SEO'd site is Bates Heating which has the number 3 spot, so major issues there. You should be mopping up traffic with your second site.

But I've no doubt you've plenty more localised key words and phrases you are targetting, so without giving them away, is the Bates Heating site also mopping up these, or is this where you are getting stung?

If the Bates site is mopping up these, then I'd hold fire and sit tight for 3 months or so and see how Google responds. So many people have been hit, I'd be amazed if there isn't an adjustment algo in the near future.

But I wouldn't spend any more money on SEO for the minute on the new site. Plus dont interfere with the old site as it's working!

Dunno if you are stuck into an SEO contract, but if you can't cancel it, at least freeze it indefinitely until this sorts itself out.

If you have lost traffic and leads from key phrases which the old site isn't picking up, then if you need the leads for your sparkys etc, and the new site was converting well, then maybe invest in a short term PPC campaign. Convert your SEO spend to PPC and you shouldn't be out of pocket and gives you some breathing space while the saga unfolds and everyone waits to see if Google admits to going to far, or if it really is the end of the road for EMDs. This should be apparent within 3 months.

In that case, you can then plan to migrate content etc to the old Bates site and concentrate on that one.

Just my tuppence worth..

I'm quite happy to just leave it for a couple of months and see what happens, I'm certainly not going to be spending anymore money on SEO for a while, the site is doing ok on bing / yahoo although I'm not sure people actually use those sites in great numbers...

I looked around a bit and found some info from seomoz and search engine journal, and it seems that the update is going to run periodically.


~ search engine journal It also has ideas that you can use to either check or fix the EMD you're having problems with.

and here is a study from seomoz about the domains hit by the EMD algo.

The best thing to do is get a link audit done to see where your backlinks are coming from. Even if its just to make sure that you were hit by accident. That way, when you resubmit, you will know about everything and everyone that links to the site. Have a look at content, social activity etc. and see if that can be altered or enhanced.

To me though, it looks like a rehash of what happened with Panda when it was first let loose. A lot of sites were hit that had no real problems at all, but in the end most of them recovered. Its just that this time, its targeting EMD's because its an exact match to a keyword being used. The update was rolled out to hit sites that put up EMD's to make a quick buck without considering content etc. But, like Panda, its taking a lot of sites down with it.

From SEOmoz, I found that there was a post they wrote in September where it shows the authority of an EMD slipping quite a bit yearly. Its just another example of rogue SEO's making life harder for the rest of us. What I've noticed is that they watch trends, and then do exactly what we would do, just plugging their sites with one blackhat technique after another, ranking their sites faster than ours, and in the end Google gets fed up, writes an algo, and kills us all regardless of whether or not we did anything wrong in the first place. It kinda sux actually.

I hope your site makes a full recovery

I'm sure it'd, provided you start collecting data about Backlinks to your site. Check if you are linked to any false neighborhoods, especially exact match domains. This is one major reason why the EMD update has hit some websites. If you don't find any you don't have to worry about it, observe deeply until the end of this month. If you don't recover from it, I'd suggest you to rebuild your sitemap and submit it back to Google, rather you can do it now as well.

Still if you don't find anything positive coming your way, post a reconsideration request to Google.