@eLiquid - I was going to page you (lol) because I know you and CC monitor volatility. I would have expected a larger sigma.
I'm thinking it wasn't as high as I would have expected because so many affiliate sites have already been knocked out of the serps by past algo's - would you agree?
I think will have to wait a few days for the dust to settle. Had a couple keywords dance. Two sites might have tanked which sucks. They only had unique content backlinks and huge anchor diversity. No GSA on first tier.
Where do we go from here? I have gone from page 1 to page 3-4 for all of my KW on my main site.
It has 2300 links and is 5 years old. I have been building 150-200 tier 1 links per week over the ;last 2 months which consist of web 2.0s, articles, wikis, directories etc (all the safe, recommended ones). I just don't know where to go from here as im afraid to build any more links at all.
One other thing I noticed is only my EMDs tanked. All other sites remained unchanged or improved. I used the exact same link building on all of them ... T1: PBNs + 2.0s, T2: GSA Contextual.
Its pretty on for me, but only b.c I know that screenshot is taking an average of ALL keywords in ALL countries for that picture, at that time only USA, UK, and Canada had been hit.
I decided to release a larger picture, detailing all countries.
on one of my sites for main keyword site isn't in 1st 1000 it was like #3 prior, for secondary KW's site performing as usual. I think this site is ready to be dumped...what are others doing?
How many of you guys that were affected used EMDs? The reason I ask is I used the exact same linking strategy on all my sites and all my branded domains were unscathed but EMDS were wiped out.
@sweeppicker - I think they included a part 2 to the whole EMD thing. It seems to be a lot of people got hit with that. I have seen exceptions, but not many.
EMDs wiped out. But my other blog which is not EMD is neither better or worse. Correlation does not equal causation but in my case if I had an EMD.. it's dropped a lot. And some were great sites with loads of content. But built upon that EMD concept. None of my sites were Tiered. Not all of them did I ever use SER against.
But to be fair... I had a blog with 400+ posts, no unnatural links, lots of social interaction and my traffic was murdered the last update. I think it's just how the game is played. Frankly, I plan on doing what I've been doing and not changing a think.
Create unique, non-spun, money sites... and link them.
@ron@sweeppicker I think this is more to do with tiered links than EMDs or anything else.
I've had some EMDs hit and also some none EMD, "branded" sites hit, where as other EMDs and sites have been left alone.
There are multiple commonalities, but the main one is that the hit sites have all had tiered links built with 2+ tiers using the "normal" contextual & junk projects per tier.
It's still early days and this could just be a intern who flicked a switch by mistake on Friday night before heading home...
@davebl. I have tiered links with unique content using some private blog networks and those rankings are the same. But yes, I would agree if its poorly spun content or anything G can detect then it could have been detrimental. I'm actually gonna redirect my tanked EMDs to some branded domains this weekend and see if I can resurrect them. I'll let you guys know.
I was actually thinking along the same lines @davbel I have a few sites with only 1 tier built to them and they were not affected.
I had sites that were heavily tiered in some fierce competitive niches which took quite a spanking. I believe it has something to do with tiered links also.
One interesting thing I noticed is that the # of backlinks dropped from a lot of my EMD properites. But they are not deindexed! Almost like Google had a list of crap sites, dropped them which may have affected my sites.
The one "normal" blog I monitor, didn't move in either direction. Another one went up (but I haven't made backlinks to it this year).
My best guess since I don't work for Google is they just dropped sites which might have affected backlink profiles. But none of them appear to be deindexed so I'm going to just continue to keep SER'ing it up.
I'm using tiered link building on all the sites I have started in the last 6 months. The only ones that were hit are the ones with EMDs.
I doubt having an EMD is enough on its own to tank, but that combined with the other factors they have optimised Penguin for, certainly seems to cause a problem.
Penguin seems to have got a lot more sensitive, with regards to what it recognises as over optmisation.
I think I'm probably going to stop using EMDs altogether if I want to still use any exact match anchors. Going to have to dilute my anchor text profile further as well in future, to be on the safe side.
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I decided to release a larger picture, detailing all countries.
Is anyone free to take a quick look at my backlink profile? To see if I'm missing anything obvious
But if it was EMD... adios.
I'll wait and see.
Create unique, non-spun, money sites... and link them.
I've had some EMDs hit and also some none EMD, "branded" sites hit, where as other EMDs and sites have been left alone.
There are multiple commonalities, but the main one is that the hit sites have all had tiered links built with 2+ tiers using the "normal" contextual & junk projects per tier.
It's still early days and this could just be a intern who flicked a switch by mistake on Friday night before heading home...
@davbel - let's hope so mate!
I had sites that were heavily tiered in some fierce competitive niches which took quite a spanking. I believe it has something to do with tiered links also.
The one "normal" blog I monitor, didn't move in either direction. Another one went up (but I haven't made backlinks to it this year).
My best guess since I don't work for Google is they just dropped sites which might have affected backlink profiles. But none of them appear to be deindexed so I'm going to just continue to keep SER'ing it up.