EMD Site Outranked by News Aggregator and Scraper Sites

[mdotk]

I have a website I am slowly trying to improve the rankings of and building backlinks. I'm creating good articles and posting them to relevant news aggregation sites <snip>. The articles are popular.

The problem is my ranking in Google is really bad. I have an EMD and when Google rolled out that update the domain tanked (from 1st page to like 10th).

That would be my problem and I could deal with it IF there wasn't crappy sites with much less content, relevancy and back links ranking higher than me in Google now. This is what I absolutely don't get!

Even the news aggregation sites outlinks <snip> rank higher in Google for terms of specific articles I have posted. The text is clearly from an article that originated on my website, but I don't even feature in the SERPs and <news aggregation site> is at the top with the "click out" link.

I have already asked for a Google reconsideration request and Google responded that there is no manual penalties being applied.

I just don't get what's going on. If you can help/consult, please let me know.

[edited by: goodroi at 10:36 am (utc) on May 16, 2013]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please go read the forum charter [/edit]

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

How old and established is your site?

If your site is very new or has very weak backlinks it is much easier for other sites to outrank (especially if you give them your content to republish).

You may want to delay your rss feed and submitting content to other sites until Googlebot sees the content on your domain first. Otherwise Google may accidentally think you are one that is republishing content.

[mdotk]

Hi and thanks for your response.

Its about 1.5 years old now. The backlinks might not be awesome but:

it is getting outranked by sites with much lower authority and worse content (I compare via opensiteexplorer) and

The aggregation outlink I am referring to above, REDIRECTS the user to my website, so Google has to know the content originated on my site! Yet the OUTLINK still ranks for the term instead of my website.

Something is not right.

[edited by: tedster at 2:15 am (utc) on May 17, 2013]

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, mdotk!


as goodroi suggested i would make sure your content is indexed by google or at least crawled by googlebot before publishing your content elsewhere.

[turbocharged]

Panda has made it much easier for scraper sites to steal content, republish and rank it on their un-pandalized domains (even if they link to you - the source). To confirm your site has been hit by Panda, look for sudden drops in past traffic and try to match up to a Panda release date. The fix would be to re-write over optimized content on your site. Your EMD also likely intensifies the Panda effect.

[martinibuster]

Don't syndicate your content to other sites until you have enough authority/PageRank. Actually, probably best not to syndicate your content.

The (theoretical?) reason is because Google ranks sites for content according to PageRank/Authority. My understanding is that the page with the most PageRank gets ranked for it. All others have their PageRank diverted to the page with the most authority. Here's an article [dejanseo.com.au] about that.

I hate syndication and would never do such a thing for my own sites. If you want to promote your content put your money where your ambition is and advertise it, tell others about it, and earn links to it by the merit of your content.

Link building is all about building good content then telling others about it. WebmasterWorld has a link development [webmasterworld.com] forum, you may want to take a look there for more information and help.

Good luck!

[aristotle]

martinibuster --
All others have their PageRank diverted to the page with the most authority.

According to the article you referenced, it's even worse:

When a copy receives higher PageRank however, and the switch takes place, all links and social signals will be re-assigned to the “winning” version.

In other words, backlinks and social signals to the original page will be credited to the scraper's page instead. This is almost beyond belief.

[martinibuster]

Right, yes, that's exactly what I meant! :o

[jimbeetle]

turbocharged, there's no reason to confirm whether the site has been hit by Panda or not, it's stated in the opening post that it was hit by the EMD update.

I have an EMD and when Google rolled out that update the domain tanked (from 1st page to like 10th).

So, it makes sense that a penalized site is not going to rank for much of anything.

[mdotk]

Guys thank you very much for your help. It is VERY much appreciated!

I am thinking now if I simply start from scratch and copy all my content to a new domain... is this something I should look at doing?

PS: jumbeetle - I know that there is at least no manual penalty applied to the site - Google told me this.

[mcskoufis]

@MartiniBuster sometimes syndication can mean hundreds of thousands of hits. There are networks that can syndicate your feeds but to the right audience, which means that within a few minutes of publishing a newsworthy item, forum threads on high traffic forums related to your niche will already be started.

Not sure if the OP is talking about a news website or not but syndication can even bring more traffic than Google or anyone else. Had over 500 visits a second in the past melting my server-turned-to-cluster completely (cloud hosting was not avail at the time).

@mdotk I would try to build more authoritative links to it and not start from scratch yet.

I have a new EMD eshop which struggled to reach the top10 for the EMD keyword. It did in the end, just needed more trust and authority. Some frequent and fresh content updates, some high quality links and thats it.

Still #5 today for the EMD keyword (1.5 months after launch) but steadily going up. Also are you waiting enough time after adding links for rankings to be recalculated? Sometimes Google is painfully slow to react leaving you frustrated as to what you did and it increased the rankings.

[aristotle]

mcskoufis wrote:
@mdotk I would try to build more authoritative links to it and not start from scratch yet.

But according to the article that martinibuster cited, backlinks to the original page are credited to the scraper's page. So building new backlinks would just help the scraper's page rank higher.

[mcskoufis]

So building new backlinks would just help the scraper's page rank higher.

Moving to a new site is a very drastic meeasure. Apart from link juice, the more frequent citation of your "brand" can help IMO.

[aristotle]

Well I didn't intend to suggest that anyone start over with a new domain. I was just trying to point out the predicament that Google's flawed algorithm has put the OP into. I agree with jimbeetle that the EMD penalty is probably the reason that the OP's pages are being outranked by scrapers. But in my opinion there can never be any justification at all for Google to knowingly and intentionally promote scrapers above the original creator of a work.

[mcskoufis]

Well I didn't intend to suggest that anyone start over with a new domain.

I didn't say you did suggest this, I was replying to mdotk

I agree with jimbeetle that the EMD penalty is probably the reason that the OP's pages are being outranked by scrapers.

Aristotle I agree with you. If you check the EMD thread, I managed to rank a site which was not ranking for its EMD keyword with some high quality links. Is why I made this suggestion :)

Ranks #5 now whereas it was nowhere near the first page for the first month of its life...

[turbocharged]

turbocharged, there's no reason to confirm whether the site has been hit by Panda or not, it's stated in the opening post that it was hit by the EMD update.

@jimbeetle

First came Panda, then Penguin then the EMD updates. Collectively, the EMD update has two sets of signals to draw from. Having an EMD on its own does not result in a penalty in itself. Those hit by the EMD update were likely near the threshold of Panda or Penguin and the EMD update was the straw that broke the camels back (the last signal of keyword targeting Google needed to demote the site). If that's the case, then it is relatively easy to fix because the negative signals are not that strong to warrant an extreme amount of effort to fix. Simply lowering keyword density on some sites is all it takes to recover from the EMD update. Going back to my original post, it is important for the OP to look for any Panda related drops in traffic - even if it was slight. Piecing the parts of the puzzle together will make it far easier for the OP to assess and correct.

[mdotk]

Guys still reviewing all your comments - many thanks!

To confirm, looking at Analytics it is very clear that I was hit on 27 Sept-1 Oct 2012.

Exact-Match Domain (EMD) Update — September 27, 2012

Google announced a change in the way it was handling exact-match domains (EMDs). This led to large-scale devaluation, reducing the presence of EMDs in the MozCast data set by over 10%. Official word is that this change impacted 0.6% of queries (by volume).


Panda #20 — September 27, 2012

Overlapping the EMD update, a fairly major Panda update (algo + data) rolled out, officially affecting 2.4% of queries. As the 3.X series was getting odd, industry sources opted to start naming Panda updates in order (this was the 20th).

[jimbeetle]

Okay, check your analytics and you should be able to tell if you were hit by the EMD update or Panda.