Can An EMD Hit Non EMDs? (main domain vs subfolders and file names)

[rustybrick]

I recently saw an interesting case of a site that was hit hard the day Matt Cutts announced the EMD update. I would be 100% convinced it was EMD related because of the drop off on that date, but... It is not an EMD.

The domain name is not a keyword phrase, rather the person's name. Yes, the site has a crazy amount of keyword rich subfolders and file names, I mean seriously over the top.

Have you seen sites that are not EMD exactly be hit by the EMD update?

[Planet13]

Oddly enough, I just read this post by JS_Harris in the other EMD thread that is currently on webmaster world:

How To Deal With EMD:
[webmasterworld.com...]

"...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."

I think this is SIMILAR to what you are asking.

[edited by: Planet13 at 2:34 pm (utc) on Jul 25, 2013]

[goodroi]

My first thought is that sometimes Google likes to release multiple updates on the same day to make it harder for people to reverse engineer what is going on. Just because a site takes a hit on the same day as a big release does not mean it was caused by the big release. I don't think that is what happened here.

I would not be surprised if the EMD formula was expanded to take into account subdomains and subdirectories. It seems like a logical next step for Google to take.

Rustybrick can you post some widgetized examples of the urls that were impacted?
How heavy are the urls with keywords?
Any significant hyphen usage?

[rustybrick]

www.personname.com/bluewidgetcity/cheapbluewidgetcity.html

But the whole site with the exception of a few pages seemed hit.

I just realized that EMD and Panda happened the same day, so this can likely be more associated with Panda than EMD...

[Dymero]

Is this really EMD or just an over-optimization penalty? I know there are similarities, but they have slightly different histories.