EMD penalty or something else?

[bwj]

Hello, I wonder whether anyone can off any insight for me. My site best adventure jobs with co uk domain was hit on 29 September, so it could be EMD and/or Panda. It was second on page one for "adventure jobs", and top of page one for "outdoor work" before 29th, then down to page 16 for a while, then to top of page two, now vanished again to something like mid twenties. Other pages of the site still rank on page one for different keywords.

I can understand the EMD thing for the first keyword, but why would it vanish for the outdoor keyword? And how can it realistically be so low in the results when many of the sites above it are completely irrelevant to the search term? Am I doing something badly wrong that is invoking some kind of penalty? There is nothing in WMT to indicate an error. If ours is a "low quality EMD", and I am supposed to look to the site that is top result for an example of how to rank well, then it would appear I need to remove all our unique content and display lots of jobs that our visitors are not looking for(!?)

I am just really struggling to understand what to do. We have started writing lots more good unique content and trying to make the site more sticky, but cannot help feeling there may be something more fundamentally wrong. We have plugged the drop in traffic with adwords but would rather have the organic stuff back.

Any advice much appreciated!
Thanks

[1leads]

You got hit since 'jobs' is a high value cpc term over 5 bucks.

The EMD kill switch had NOTHING to do with 'quality'.

It was 100% based on if a term is worth money (usually over 5 bucks cpc) google wants an EMD developer/owner buying ppc.

Since we had thousands of developed EMD's and have close to 20 years development on our end, we saw what EMD's google hit and everyone had high value cpc terms.

You are still relevant for a minor term

uk adventure jobs
adventure jobs uk

jobs is high value cpc term, lots of buyers

adventure jobs is an emd to your domain

you add a geo prefix, the dumb emd kill switch lets you back in

due to being a UK tld and also you have UK in title tag

[bwj]

Thanks, sort of makes sense until you see that there are still three other sites on page one with EMD for the search term. How did they avoid it?

I am reluctant to change the domain name. Wouldn't that be like starting again, or would 301 on the old domain do the job?

[1leads]

the two spots using 'aventure jobs' are bs tld's

.co is brazil
.nz is new zealand

so they slipped thru the EMD filter

the reason, no buyers of any value for that term in cpc in those markets

.uk is huge english market so it's penalized like the big 3 tld's com/net/org

.ca and uk have large english speaking user bases

.co is bs, a tld marketed by godaddy as .co = company bs it's BRAZIL

.nz is minor minor tld

so that's why your domain got hit by EMD kill switch and the others didn't

no market share of buyers for 'jobs' in those markets

google will probably tweak the EMD kill switch to include minor tld's soon now that you pointed it out

or rather since I pointed out how .co//nz are getting by the jobs filter now on EMD kill shots

[bwj]

I'm not sure what version of google you are looking at, but on the .co.uk version, there are three or four .co.uk sites using exact or near exact match domains for that search term. That is the part I am struggling to understand. There have to be other factors, I just cannot see them.

[1leads]

I'm on .com from a IP inside USA

for that search

no EMD's except a .co and .nz

now in UK you have two possible EMD's

.co.uk
.org.uk

that's it

you have one

now if the other EMD is showing

it's probably the .org.uk right?

or if they added a minor term to the EMD then the emd filter won't hit it

so outside of UK in USA only emd's are irrelevant TLD's

I'd have to use a UK IP to get what you see

but EMD's are emd's

google hit them

anything showing is not a true EMD imo for the UK

UPDATE
I went to google.co.uk

Searched 'adventure jobs'

EMD showing here for the .co.uk

use a different machine with a clean cache

probably a variation that is not an exact match

[1leads]

Did you know almost 20% of your traffic comes from

'gym instructor jobs cruise ships'

now that is a niche

haha

68% from 'adventure jobs'

at least that's what 'alexa' thinks

since your rank is 1.whatever million

it's not that reliable usually

[DarrenHaye]

Please don't listen to 1leads, in his world everything is googles fault.. he is just chatting garbage imo.

Just to confirm is your site bestadventurejobs.co.uk? if so I will have a look at it for you and try and offer help (rather than just saying googles fault).

[1leads]

actually I saw the keyword 'adventure jobs' and saw he had an emd in uk tld

but it's a 'best' prefix

still an emd in that he is targeting 'adventure jobs' with a known spam prefix

best
top
etc

are all prefix spam to google

so he wants to target 'adventure jobs' and while jobs is a high end cpc term, the category 'adventure' is not, that's why you see an EMD on top of goog.uk

so my bad, I read his post and saw 'a j's' and looked to name and saw 'a j's' again but didn't catch the spam prefix

so in this case, google can care less about the emd adventure jobs since the .co.uk is top of google

there's no maps, so organic gets some traffic

since you don't control the low value cpc term, you need traditional short term seo, not long term seo

long term seo used to mean, control of an EMD with certain types of content google likes and relevant links

if 'a j's' was a high value cpc term which it is not, you would not see the real EMD there

I thought you said you had an EMD, you don't

you have a low quality spam prefix on a minor cpc term

that's why reading the post I was led to believe you had the adventurejobs.co.uk

you don't

you have SPAMPREFIX-EMD.co.uk

That's a whole issue in itself, spam prefixes.

There's only 3 major prefixes google doesn't frown upon long term

and BEST and TOP aren't them

you have a SPAM partial EMD, and the emd kill switch is not why you dropped

so yeah, now that I'm clear you do not have what you said you have an EMD, the reason is simple

whatever you are doing was considered irrelevant at this point in time

quality of links
content
length of time on the net
fresh content
etc
etc

EMD's are EMD's you are not an EMD and yet the original post said you were and the first term you speak of AJ's

So I checked it and saw it is showing

not your site, the prefix spam site, but the real EMD

now if that EMD was over 5bucks it would be hit too

that's the dividing line

so traditional seo is what killed you, whatever you were doing was hit by panda or penguin, you weren't hit by the EMD update

the EMD update is in the main google index algorithm not the stuff they created to track low grade seo work and low grade content

so whatever the last panda or penguin considered is what hit you

it's not EMD

you don't have an emd

now maybe google finally added best and top to their SPAM filters

it's a SPAM prefix

get a non-spam prefix

i, e, 1, 247

claiming to be 'best' or 'top' is self grandization or SPAM

bottom line EMD is not your issue here

it's a panda or penquin tweak that hit you

[bwj]

Thanks. I think
Darren, yes that is the one, thank you.

[gazzahk]

I would consider your lack of quality links. On a quick look (opensiteexplorer) it appears you have none. Just links from peoples link pages. These type of link page links have been getting worth less and less. Maybee you had a quality link/s and lost it/them.

Even if this was not the cause of your drop you do need to get some decent links or recovery is unlikley is my view...

Good luck...

[michlewill]

Well, let me tell you that i was so much confused with the EMD. i Own 30 websites targeting different cities with a country specific extension. Each one had the city name and the keywords we were optimizing. Almost 2 months back we faced a huge drop in our rankings and our client manager at Centex Technologies Tx asked us to improve the content. We have also started to do - Local business submissions and Classified ads. Besides this we got onto off-page tasks like article submission (To highly relevant websites and with strict submission guidelines)

Last week we are back again on almost the same ranks. i believe the EMD update is nothing but removal of weight-age of having keyword in the domain name. IT has nothing to do with the penalty.