Google’s EMD (Exact Match Domain) Penalty

In order to provide an improved search experience to the users, Google updates its algorithms frequently. According to Matt Cutt, Google updates its algorithm almost every day and around 500 times throughout the year. It is aimed at providing the best possible results for the searchers.

Every website on Google is an EMD site. For example, if you explore an ordinary website namely cloudcompany100.com, it would still be an exact match for the search term “cloud company 100”. While you go deeper into this update, you find that it is not even truly targeting EMD domains. It is indeed targeting low-quality and spammy domains. Reputed and authoritative sites thus survived the penalty.

Related: Latest Google’s Fred Update

What is Google EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update?

Google launched EMD (Exact Match Domain) update in September 2012 to prevent poor quality and spammy sites from ranking well. Prior to that update, poor-quality sites were ranking as they had words that matched keyword search terms in their domain names. Websites with quality content and backlinks from authoritative sites have survived the updates successfully.

How Can EMD Websites Survive the EMD Update?

When you have an EMD, you don’t need to possess all of your anchor text, meta, and on-page factors to target the keywords. In addition to that, you should also keep updating your website frequently, link to the high authority sites, create strong internal linking, and find ways that increase user engagement. They will surely work for you in a long way. Some common factors to survive EMD updates include:

• Don’t build the exact match anchor texts
• Avoid stuffing keywords of your EMD into your titles and meta
• Social media presence
• YouTube videos on the page
• Very few affiliate links

How to Recover from the Google Exact Match Domain (EMD) Penalty?

If your website has already been hit by the EMD update of 2012, then there is a maximum chance that the site is only penalized for the keywords contained in your domain. In this situation, you do not have a better suggestion than buying a new domain instead and start working again. Remember that while facing such situations, while your business is not totally dependent on that one keyword, we recommend you to keep working with the other pages without fail.

Some Tips to Recover from the EMD Penalty

Create Quality Content Only

Content always remains king for each and every website that is in the upward stride. Fresh, quality and SEO-compliant content are one of the main factors in SEO to turn it dynamic thus you must pay attention to that factors. Such content will not only help you improve your ranking but also ascertain survival from any kind of Google algorithm refreshment penalties. You are also advised to avoid the thin, low and copycatted contents to your site at all levels.

You May Also Like: Tips for High Ranking Transformational Website Content

Refurbish Old Blog Posts

You can easily improve the organic rankings of existing blog posts just by editing and refurbishing some content of them to turn them into fresh ones. Optimize them with new keywords besides thorough modification and update in the content elements according to your current needs. Interlink the relevant posts but make sure that you avoid keyword cannibalization. It can mar your site even though previous attempts and plans were effectively monitored.

Related: Benefits of Internal Linking in SEO

Build a New SEO Strategy

Once you get penalized by Google, you are enlisted as violators and therefore can’t easily escape. It is high time for you to do another thorough introspection to plan for a new and fresh SEO strategy and implement that without fail. Avoid spammy link-building strategies, including the link farming steps amongst others. Such steps would greatly help to improve the overall ranking. Careful planning and proper implementation of new SEO strategies will also bring back organic traffic to your website thus you once again follow the path to success.

Redirect Your Website to a New Domain

Whenever you are penalized for EMD reasons, the best means for you as a rescue step is to buy a new domain and redirect your website into that. 301 redirect from old to a new domain is suggested as it will redirect all your backlinks and traffics.

Final Thoughts: Google EMD Update

Google updates are aimed to provide a correct answer to the searchers. You are thus advised to work for your audiences as first preferences but equally for the search engines to notice your site. Apart from EMD updates, there were several other updates too which often penalize the low-quality websites. It is better for webmasters to create an authoritative website to update that consistently with fresh content. With a high-quality website, you definitely survive EMD and the rest of Google updates. They indeed bring ample peace of mind.

High-quality sites will attract traffic naturally. Try to rank the individual pages of your website rather than focusing on the home page. Bit cleverness, and supported by hard work, can create wonders. You can easily maintain the ranking of your website on Google which is your ultimate ambition.