Complete and total contradiction in advice

[Turbosatan]

I have an issue

I advise my clients (based on research experience and keeping up to date on discussions across lots of forums and chat rooms) that for a website to be successful there are a few things that have changed recently and need to be given more weight than they used to.

1 onsite content needs to be updated more regularly
2 exact match domains can be penalised (in this case my clients was on the 27th of september )
3 inboundlinks need to be good quality in order to gain a good ranking

my clients site was previously at #4 and another at #7 pn page 1 for the term in question

the #4 website dropped off totally when we created a new website which we are looking into now but that is not the issue

the #7 website was dropped to page 7 on the date of the EMD update.

now this can all be explained by normal movement and updates etc and the advice i am giving is as above.

however

the #1 website for this term has an exact match domain name (with just UK at the end)
it has not been updated for years
it has a total of 5 backlinks showing in majestic and opensiteexplorer

So any advice on how i can truthfully be advising them to do the updates i am suggesting when this has happened to their website and the #1 rank is totally contradicting everything i suggest

Has anyone else seen this kind of result ?

the #1 site is also 2 years old whereas client sites are 7 and 10 years old

is google literally just messing with me????

[komfort]

you should be very careful when you optimize for any site.
if you do any wrong step then you will have to pay fine for that.

[joshz]

No. But you're messing with your client.

[ALorenzo]

1) Yes and no, there are different techniques for static sites and dynamic sites. Not every website is or should be a blog or news outlet. Static sites can be great havens for evergreen content. If the site is in the industry with a lot of cutting edge news then adding a blog to drive traffic may be in order.

2) Exact match domains aren't penalized, they are just less important in terms of calculating placement in SERPS. The effect is, basically, dampened.

3) True every day of the week.

So we can agree the previous #4 site probably has some growing pains from the major update. The copy on the site has probably changed, the structure, and so on. Make sure you have 301 redirects in place and just monitor how it recovers in the coming weeks. Review your site for over optimization of keywords in the copy; if it's annoying for you to read then it's probably over optimized.

As far as the #7 site that is nowhere to be found.... the bigger picture needs to be considered. Are you searching with personalized search off in Google (a duh! type thing but I still have to ask)? Does the current #1 actually have information that solves your query? Are all of its backlinks high quality? If you search for the business, does it or its products pop up on sites with a good reputation regardless of there being a link or not? Google, for instance, is starting to rely on co-citation which can help show the importance of a link or mentioned site based on the text around it.

[Turbosatan]

you should be very careful when you optimize for any site.
if you do any wrong step then you will have to pay fine for that.

what are you on about paying a fine? oh i see your just trying to build up your post count

[Turbosatan]

1) Yes and no, there are different techniques for static sites and dynamic sites. Not every website is or should be a blog or news outlet. Static sites can be great havens for evergreen content. If the site is in the industry with a lot of cutting edge news then adding a blog to drive traffic may be in order.

2) Exact match domains aren't penalized, they are just less important in terms of calculating placement in SERPS. The effect is, basically, dampened.

3) True every day of the week.

So we can agree the previous #4 site probably has some growing pains from the major update. The copy on the site has probably changed, the structure, and so on. Make sure you have 301 redirects in place and just monitor how it recovers in the coming weeks. Review your site for over optimization of keywords in the copy; if it's annoying for you to read then it's probably over optimized.

As far as the #7 site that is nowhere to be found.... the bigger picture needs to be considered. Are you searching with personalized search off in Google (a duh! type thing but I still have to ask)? Does the current #1 actually have information that solves your query? Are all of its backlinks high quality? If you search for the business, does it or its products pop up on sites with a good reputation regardless of there being a link or not? Google, for instance, is starting to rely on co-citation which can help show the importance of a link or mentioned site based on the text around it.

hi. first off thanks for an actual helpful answer.

its ceertainly not a major niche for sure. but there are developments which happen. to be honest its the first time i have come across a site in the past few months now where the content was more then 3 years old and still retained a #1 ranking

#2 in this case it was. nothing else changed. the site on the 27th to 29th of September suddenly dropped. the only change on that day was Google releasing their update. there was no change to the site at all.

also im fairly confident with SEO etc i dont have any personalized search on etc. the searches and ranking checks are done through big g stealth extractor proxy using Advanced web ranking. the #1 sites links are crap quality at best.

I had not considered citations that much in this case but the #1 site itself doesnt even have a local + page so i cant imagine citations would be having that much effect?
Have you seen citations being linked to a site without places/local business listings beign associated with the webpage?

[tstolber]

Is the site with 5 back links showing in majestic doing cloaking? View it as Googlebot and see if there is different content than if you are a normal user agent - this might shed some light on what is going on.

[Doodled]

Sometimes I think people see this upside down. I see it as a website has not dropped, just other websites are ranking better! Google has decided other websites serve users better for that keyword phrase - have you had a look at them and do you agree?

All three bits of advice that you give are not necessarily true:
- you don't need fresh content, just good content
- exact domains won't harm, they just don't help as much as they used to
- you can rank well without (or with very few) inbound links for large numbers of keyword phrases

So I think I agree with Joshz - you're messing with your client ...

[Dr.Marie]

Just wanted to point out here that this doesn't necessarily have to be EMD. Google was pretty vocal in announcing the EMD update on Sep 28 but quietly released a Panda update on Sep 27. When I asked people to send me domains they thought were affected by EMD, 95% of them were actually Panda casualties.

I would guess these are more likely to be Panda issues than EMD, but would have to see the sites to know for sure.

[gazzahk]

You have received some pretty helpful replies. In relation to the EMD effect. As stated by Marie that was a loss of benefit thing not a penalty thing. So it could relate to loss rankings. If the other websites competing for these ranking don't have very good links then EMD benefit may have been making the difference. But without real details we are all just guessing.

The answer though in my view is to check your content (as suggested by Marie), a panda thing. Make sure it is very relevant to the search terms you are targeting and it is unique and of sufficient quality for any user behavior/social factors to support its rankings. This is now a general piece of advice for any website wishing to hold/gain rankings in light of recent Google changes.

Good luck…..

[mibut]

A couple of my sites have also been hit by this panda update, i also at first thought emd.
I am planning a redesign of one of the sites. Now my conundrum. Everyone says to 301 existing pages BUT if google, through its updates, has totally devalued those pages will i not be shooting myself in the foot by redirecting "valueless" (in googles eyes) pages and saying that the new pages are therefore "valueless".

[gazzahk]

Check you analytics and webmaster tools. If the pages get zero entry traffic and have zero links then no real need to redirect. However I do not think that 301 would hurt the new pages. It is more a matter of Google not thinking the old pages were of enough relevance/quality/trust to return in realtion to search terms rather then any negative thing.

Still if the pages were of no use then getting rid of/or updating them seem like good ideas....

[Doodled]

will i not be shooting myself in the foot by redirecting "valueless" (in googles eyes) pages and saying that the new pages are therefore "valueless".

Before you start thinking about 301s check whether or not Google or Bing even recognise their existance anymore. You can do this in Google and Bing WMT. If those pages are no longer in the search engine index then the 301 will not be relevant to them. It will only help if people have created links / bookmarked those old pages ....

[SEO Haven]

You say:

1 onsite content needs to be updated more regularly
2 exact match domains can be penalised (in this case my clients was on the 27th of september )
3 inboundlinks need to be good quality in order to gain a good ranking

Fact is:
1. Yes, fresh content helps, but it's not the #1 sollution. It's likely the competitor you speak about here has flawless on-page SEO with more relevant content relating to the search query (your client's keyword/phrase).
2. Not always. If they're thin content sites and were build purely to take advantage of the EMD keyword/phrase, targets very limited amount of keywords (all very similar to the EM keyword), then yes, you'll get penalized. EMD's are still very much effective, only difference is now you have to be a bit smarter about it.
3. Very true. But since he's got only 5 backlinks, refer back to #1 above (for having flawless content/on-page SEO).

Want to beat him? Start analyzing his landing page, meta tags and content structure.

[gazzahk]

Want to beat him? Start analyzing his..., meta tags.......

lol... You are kidding right?