romerome - 11:40 pm on Sep 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

SevenCubed wrote :

"The affected one is the oldest (5 years) and is the one site that does have about 50 backlinks with not enough anchor text variation"

nomis5 wrote

"All the sites, affected and unaffected, are designed using the same very, very simple template. All are equally well researched, written and illustrated with my own graphics."

So I am seeing something very similar. I have some EMD's that got hit and some that didn't. I dont see any correlations between the sites that got hit and those that didn't.

Not sure if this gets us closer to answers but I wonder if G was able to determine what is a EMD and what is not an EMD. Its certainly possible, but harder, for a algo. "bluewidgets" and "greenwidgets" one is a EMD and one is a company name. If someone is not in that business it could be hard to tell the difference. You would have to know that bluewidgets is a product and greenwidgets is just the company. Both terms could even get equal traffic. Splitting those apart is possible but not trivial.

I am leaning toward a general change in how domainnames are treated. Partly because I am seeing non EMD's hit in the same time frame and I don't think its chance.