atlrus - 3:26 pm on Oct 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Your statment is a perfect example of why we're seeing Google taking action against EMDs. SEOs have been doing exactly what you say on a huge scale for years. Why would Google want to rank thousands of sites, millions of pages of stuff generated by the SEO industry? If every SEO that setup a site on an EMD built the best possible site for that niche, then I doubt we'd be seeing this update. But the reality is that a lot of EMD sites target low hanging fruit with boilerplate sites that have little to no resources behind them. There are lots of exceptions of course, as realmaverick points out, but I don't recall a Google update in the past decade that hasn't taken out innocent bystanders. Nature of the beast.

Regardless of your arbitrary opinion of a website, it still doesn't change the fact that in 99% of the cases an EMD is always related to the content of the website.

Now, whether the website is "quality" is a different discussion. Your claim was that EMD is no longer an indicator of relevance and you couldn't be more wrong. Again, people buy EMDs to build websites around the EMD, thus almost always the EMD will be a top indicator of what the website is all about. What EMD is NOT - an indicator of quality, but I don't see how you can dispute relevance.