arikgub - 9:51 pm on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

EMDs by themselves?

According to my observations, this update did have some special impact on EMDs. In a way that leaves me puzzled.

I have a few EMDs.

One, the *.co.uk EMD with nearly zero incoming links moved from #2 for the exact match to #1, leaving the corresponding eBay listing behind. Even though it is a low competition phrase with less than 1000 searches a month, passing over eBay with 2-3 incoming links from forums and blog comments is ridiculous and usually doesn't happen.

The other, *.net EMD online store that has been #1 for a competitive money term was hit big time. The website has thousands of backlinks of various quality, some are really good and some are spammy. I wouldn't claim the site is of extraordinary quality, but it is certainly not worse than any other store in this niche. You can even say the site has some brand signals cause many users are searching specifically for "***.net" in Google (including the ".net" part). After the update this "***.net" term is our top search keyword.

Yet, another ***.us EMD in the same niche (not mine), a pure spam having a ton of hidden links (display:none) pointing to it was upgraded from nowhere straight to #2 for the keyword it is targeting and straight to #1 for its synonym.

What the hell is going on here... It would be silly to target EMDs by themselves, but may be there is some indirect factor in the play. May be the keywords in the domain are triggering some sort of anchor over-optimization devaluation ..