Yet another Google update
Last weekend Google rolled out yet another change to its ranking algorithm which it says will affect 0.6% of all English language sites. (That’s a lot of sites!)
Its referred to as the EMD update – which stands for Exact Match Domain – and we’ve already come across several companies whose rankings have crashed as a result of this.
If you sell yellow widgets and you have a domain name www.yellowwidgets.com then you might have considered this an advantage. In fact many SEO companies have promoted strategies of setting up multiple websites – or microsites- with keyword rich domains to achieve good rankings. This approach is now unlikely to work.
Our approach has always been in sync with Google’s general guidelines of good optimised sites with good content – we’ve always said that if you do good SEO and you have a exact match domain that’s good and will give you an advantage. But we’ve always stressed that having an exact match domain is not an alternative to good SEO practice.
This slide is courtesy of SEOMoz who’ve done some early work on the impact and it seems to be substantial – here’s the full report….
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data
So what can you do if you’ve been affected?
You will know pretty quickly if you have and if so it’s back to SEO basics I’m afraid – good content, good links, good SEO. This practice is embodied in the courses we run and also the free online lessons you can find at https://www.janklin.com/blog/
