How to deal with EMD?

[lzr0]

Hi,
Apparently EMD update affected not just domains, but individual pages as well. I have many pages with main keyphrase both in their url and meta title, which used to rank high on these keyphrases. It was not spammy (in my view)- the keyphrases were short 2-3 words and I did not repeat them too often on the page, maybe just a few times. Nevertheless, after emd Google update and later on as well, most of these pages disappeared from search results for their main keyphrases (which are in url), but still rank well for other keyphrases, which are not in url. Seems to me like for Google it's an over-optimization signal.
I wonder if anyone experienced similar thing and managed to recover?
If I have a keyphrase in a page url, is it worth now to completely remove this phrase from meta title?
How do you guys suggest to deal with this?

[goodroi]

I view exact match domain as an under optimization issue. By removing the ranking boost Google used to grant to exact matching domains it exposed several websites that did not have enough other ranking signals.

[lzr0]

I view exact match domain as an under optimization issue. By removing the ranking boost Google used to grant to exact matching domains it exposed several websites that did not have enough other ranking signals.

Goodroi,
I was talking about internal pages, not domains. Aside from this, emd update not just removed a boost that used to be there, but in some cases seemed to add huge negative "weight" in order to artificially push emd domains and individual pages far down.
I am still seeking input and advice from others on dealing with this and specifically with sub-pages with keyphrase in url (as I described in my first post).

[mromero]

Google's current hangup with EMD is very problematic and for no good reason as far as established businesses, say those 10 years old or more.

This post does not refer to EMD websites slapped together in the last couple years with useless content by some webmaster somewhere!

Back in the day if you were in the widget business, naturally you would seek out widget dot com and register your business as widget Ltd., Ag. or whatever, have it in the Yellow Pages, Chamber of Commerce and so on. This is the genesis of branding.

In the current environment, those businesses that were early and smart to get widget dot com are the victims of EMD profiling.

How to solve? Very difficult. Some suggestions:

Continue to build out your good content.

If you pile up the good content there is only so much that the EMD penalty can do.

Go for the long tail with a vengeance.

Buy adverts.

Hustle like mad on the social media platform.

Some webmasters do no get social media. Get over it and just use it. Or pay people that live on social media to help.

There are millions of real people on Facebook and if your content is authoritative, they will share it and give you love and they are not biased on EMDs.

Get links - this will happen naturally in the long run. Good content is hard to keep down!

Last, but key to survival and even growth:

THINK LIKE A REPRESSED MINORITY.

You have to work 4X harder and smarter than the others to make up for the color of your domain name.

[lzr0]

mromero,
Thanks for reply. All you said makes sense, but my question was a bit different. Say, I have a sub-page about ABC with url /abc.html and title "ABC guide". This page disappeared from search results for ABC, but still ranks high for many other keyphrases, which are not in url. So, the page itself is not penalized, it is just an issue with the main keyphrase.

I am looking for input and advice from people who experienced similar things. For example, is it worth removing ABC from the title even though the page is really about ABC, just to get out of Google's perceived over-optimization? Did it worked for someone, or did it not?

[Planet13]

@ lzr0

All I can say is that the smaller businesses that still rank well in the niche that I watch - and most of them have been replaced by the amazons, ebays and wikipedias of the world - are PRETTY SPAMMY when it comes to their use of URLs, page titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions.

For instance, in the niche "blue widgets" the top remaining independent players have either the word "blue" or the word "widget" in their domain name, and usually have the keyword phrase in the file name as well:

www.mywidgets.com/blue-widgets.html

I would say in this niche, that if you are a small business and you DON'T have your URL and file name set up like this, then you WON'T be ranking in the top 30.

I hope this helps.

[JS_Harris]

Hustle like mad on the social media platform.

Yeah... like, no. Dun wanna, can't make me, and I do just fine. Social is not for everyone, or every site :)

I firmly believe that how good I am at social networking plays absolutely no role in the quality of my site. In fact, time spent chatting on social networks instead of working on my site detracts from it's potential quality. Social can generate backlinks but those are Google's problem, mine is quality and quality alone. Just think of how many lifetimes of man hours have been spent on social already and then imagine how much better websites would be if it was spent on improving them instead! You don't need to be ON social to hear what's going on, heck sites like Yahoo even write entire articles based on tweets now so you can read the news and hear the twitter chatter without even logging on.

Anyway, that's for another thread. I just wanted to add that the EMD effect seems to hit sites that do not have an exact match base url but do have exact match title and/or internal links repeated sitewide. These urls tend to have their domain name appended to the end of their desired titles in search results. EMD is about more than just the base url.