In the German SERPs I'm seeing several keyword domains making a comeback. It started at the beginning of December.
Anyone else seeing this?
Any ideas about the reasons (apart from Penguin update)?
aakk9999
2:02 pm on Dec 22, 2014 (gmt 0)
I have an EMD in German SERPs. It was #1 for a few years and then a few months ago (somewhere in August/Sept) dropped to #3. I have checked just now and it is still #3.
Have you done anything to improve your sites that are making comeback?
doc_z
2:09 pm on Dec 22, 2014 (gmt 0)
I've seen this phenomenon for several different domains (about 10). Just one of this is my own and I didn't made any changes the last 3 month for this domain.
The "comeback" is normally an improvenment like 3->1, 8->4, 12->8 and so on. In almost all cases the improvement took place between 1st and 8th December.
mrengine
2:54 pm on Dec 22, 2014 (gmt 0)
I don't see any changes that are specific to EMD in the USA. These EMD domains are moving around along with branded domains, which leads me to believe that some other factor is causing the minor movements.
Despite many EMD that were hammered in the past, EMD that bring good value to visitors have held up really well. But I think the whole EMD concept is a factor considered by Panda, which means the other signals that Panda looks at had better be beneath the threshold to trigger a demotion.
EditorialGuy
4:20 pm on Dec 22, 2014 (gmt 0)
I know of one extremely low-quality EMD site that's still doing pretty well on Google.com, though not as well as it did a few months ago.
Another EMD e-commerce site is still ranking #1 for a major informational search query, even it obviously isn't what searchers have in mind when they search on that keyphrase.
I think Google is still struggling to find the sweet spot between apparent relevance (as signaled by an EMD), quality, and user intent.
Panthro
3:53 pm on Dec 23, 2014 (gmt 0)
I've seen both EMD and partial-match domains regain some traction since early this month. It seems to me to be an overall heavier weighting for kw's in the domain.
Hoople
6:57 pm on Dec 26, 2014 (gmt 0)
What was removed above them that allowed them to move up? Perhaps nothing changed for your EM domains and those removed have suffered some sort of Google sanction?
Do you have before / after comparison with another SE like Bing or DDG?
doc_z
9:44 am on Dec 27, 2014 (gmt 0)
Perhaps nothing changed for your EM domains and those removed have suffered some sort of Google sanction?
No, nothing was removed - the domains I saw just moved up. For example one of them (3->1) was for a keyword with high traffic and the competitor who was on #1 and moved to #2 is ebay.
I didn't watch bing SERPS in detail (less than 5% in Germany) and cannot say anything about the changes there.
MrSavage
5:43 pm on Dec 28, 2014 (gmt 0)
This would be welcomed news. For the most part, I've given up on my EMDs, even though they have decent content. Does anyone disagree when I suggest that Google actually threw an anchor onto your EMD site? As in, it wasn't even break-even. It was if it was a detriment that was used against the site. I know we can debate that truly wonderful EMD sites rose above this tar and feathering, but I feel it's nonsense. I'm sure it sounds good to say that all EMD's with great content could still rank. That is a fallacy I'm not falling for, but go ahead and believe it. I have better things to do that chase EMDs at this point. Watching paint dry to me is more productive.
So, there is a false positive here about a change of hope with EMDs? I haven't bothered checking my stats for a year or years.
toidi
6:06 pm on Dec 28, 2014 (gmt 0)
I have some emds with little or no content that are doing very well right now. It doesnt make any sense how sites with only 5 pages containing nothing but iframes can do so good. This has been going on for a couple of months now. No major changes in the serps, just these sites jumped up. Go figure. Actually, it is probably a waste of time to try to figure it out.
