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For a long time, using exact match domains to rank for specific keywords was one of the easiest ways to gain an edge in the competitive SEO wars. Domains names were given a ranking advantage over websites when it came to the keyword phrase contained in the domain.

While this ranking boost made sense from common-sense standpoint – after all, if your website is bluewidgets.com, it’s likely relevant to a search for “blue widgets” – this phenomenon was often used by SEOs to easily outrank more authoritative sources for specific key phrases, especially long-tail search terms.

Whether you think it’s a positive development or not Google released an algorithm update on Sept 28, 2012 – known as the EMD update – that has severely reduced and possibly eliminated any SEO benefit of having your targeted search phrase in your domain name. According to Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts, this update noticeably affected .6% of English-US search queries. To add to the confusion, Google released a major Panda algorithm update during the same period which affected 2.6% of English-US search queries. This caused many webmasters and SEOs to confuse the algorithm update targeting exact match domains with a panda update designed to target low quality content. The timing of the updates was likely intentionally designed to cause confusion.

Matt Cutts announcing EMD update
Matt Cutts announcing EMD update and “weather changes” in SERP

 

What To Take Out Of The EMD Update

While there is no way to know with 100% certainty at this point, it seems likely based on the initial data and that the EMD update devalues exact match domains, rather than penalizes them. Many strong, white-hat exact match domains dropped a few positions/pages in the search engine rankings but didn’t suffer anything that would be consistent with a penalty.

For exact match domains that were severely demoted, this is likely because they were experiencing significant boosts from their domains which – once devalued – severely hurt their rankings. Some of these significant drops also look a lot like a panda penalty, and could also be a result of the Panda update that occurred at the same time, and may actually be unrelated to the EMD update. After all, Panda is designed to target what Google deems to be low quality websites, and the reality is that many exact match domains built around long-tail search terms are created by SEOs solely for the purpose of generating Adsense or affiliate revenue.

With reports that many EMDs with highly optimized keyword density and header tags experienced significant drops, one other possibility is that the EMD update not only removes exact match SEO benefits, but it also goes beyond and penalizes domains that are over-optimized for their exact match key phrase. Because the EMD update was released at the same time as a major Panda update (which could also target over-optimized sites), it may be awhile before we sort out whether the EMD update has any actual penalty effect, or whether it’s merely designed to remove the extra boost given to exact match domains.

Current EMD influence by Mozcast.com
Current EMD influence calculated at Mozcast.com

 

How The EMD Update Will Affect Your SEO Strategy Going Forward

One thing is clear going forward after the EMD update – relying on the exact match domain boost for easier search engine rankings is no longer a viable strategy. With reports of heavily keyword-optimized sites being penalized, it also seems clear that Panda, Penguin and the latest EMD update are working together to force SEOs to develop ranking strategies that look as natural as possible.

While there will always be exceptions to the rule, the general trend in SEO will be focused quality and diversity. Including a targeted keyword in your title, url, h1, h2, h3 tags, picture alt tags, and bolded throughout your content may no longer be the best idea. While you should ensure that your targeted keyword appears in your title and at least one header tag, focus your on-site efforts towards creating a quality user experience. Whether it’s due to the latest EMD update or an addition to the Panda update, it looks like Google is targeting websites that are over-optimizing their on-page SEO for specific keywords – especially if your website is new or has less authority.

Continue to build links from quality sources with a wide variety of anchor text. Avoid links from linkfarms, spam, or any source that will link out to bad neighborhoods such as low quality directories/bookmarking sites. The more natural your link profile and on-site SEO, the less likely you can be targeted for penalties.

Is SEO Dead?

The cries that SEO is dead are as always – totally misguided. This latest algorithm update didn’t change the number of organic positions in Google, and many of these positions are still occupied by smaller niche sites. There is definitely a trend with Google towards favoring larger authority websites, established brands, and Google’s own content, but there is still plenty of room for other sites to rank.

SEO is dead

 

Author Bio:
Nat is a full-time SEO and a part-time blogger for Whoishostingthis.com – an Alexa top 10k web property. You can find additional information about their hosting reviews through their company website.

The guys over at Subtle Network Design and Marketing have created a rather humorous, dungeons and dragons-esque card game focusing around the many forms of search engine optimization tactics.

Each card has its own unique character with their special abilities and a clever description about how they handle their services. We found the con-man to be particularly entertaining. In addition to their own special abilities, they have unique attributes such as diamonds, authority bombs, shield strength, and attack power which represent how effective an individual character is at SEO.

The diversity and descriptions are creative and entertaining to read, and we hope the guys at Subtle Network will include more cards and characters as time goes on, especially with all the diverse tactics in the SEO world. We wonder what Subtle Network will come up with next.

Enjoy the infographic.

Affiliate marketing[1] has been big business for almost as long as the Internet has been around, but the business is constantly changing. The core idea behind affiliate marketing remains the same as it’s always been – get lots of traffic to your offers, and build a great sales page so that the traffic converts.

Sadly, getting traffic is becoming more and more difficult. The size of your audience is expanding, but the number of people that are running affiliate sites is expanding too, and the search engines are cracking down on a lot of the older, spammy link-building techniques. This means the blog commenting bot you saw advertised on that affiliate forum won’t do much for you. However, there are a lot of other ways to build links. Here are a few ideas for you.

Affiliate marketing

Content Marketing

Far too many affiliates focus on picking out a huge list of products, building sales pages, and hoping for the best. It is possible to succeed with a huge network of products and sites, but there’s a good chance you’ll burn out if you do this. Instead of trying to make money off a huge network, why not focus on a handful of products that you truly love, and genuinely believe in.

Content marketing[2] means creating awesome content that your competitors simply can’t match. Instead of just putting together a sales page, add value. Write reports that actually inform or entertain. If you sell protein powders, write an app that people can use in the gym to track their workouts. If you promote dating sites, run an agony aunt style column that provides genuinely useful dating advice. Sales pages don’t get links, great content does.

Content Marketing

Quality Links

If you are going to go out and seek people to exchange links with, don’t waste your time on link lists, top ten sites, spammy blogs, or barely related, low traffic sites. Pick high quality sites with content related to yours, and send personal emails to the owners of those sites. Make it obvious that you’ve read their site, and take the time to explain what your site is and why they should link to it. Link exchanges do work, but you’ll need to put some work in to earn quality links.

Guest Posting

Guest posting[3] is a great way to earn natural-looking links to your site from a range of other sites. Next time you’re reading an affiliate forum, see if you can spot some site owners that work within your niche and would be interested in taking posts from you. While you’re browsing the web for leisure, look out for blogs that you like reading, and take a look at their about page. If they accept guest posts, send them something.

Make sure that the post you write is interesting, well written, and useful. Yes, it takes time to write good posts, but it’s worth it if you want to develop a good name for yourself online.

Guest posting
Image by advancedwebranking.com

Product Reviews

Product reviews are essential for affiliates. If you want consumers to buy the product you’re promoting, you need to prove that they can trust it. Build up a relationship with a few good reviewers, and send them samples for your best products.

Giveaways and Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a good way to build buzz around your product. You can start fairly small; use your social media profile to promote some giveaways, and ask people to comment on your profile, share your content, or post something interesting (a funny image related to your niche, a poem, a short video – anything easy to create that will attract viewers), in return for an entry into a completion for a free product. Crowd sourcing is a great way to get organic links to your product pages, and it can be good PR too!

Wayne Barker writes for the affiliate marketing forum Twist. With a bustling community at Twist you are bound to find the information that you need to succeed.

Resources:
1. Affiliate marketing – Wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing 
2. Content marketing – Wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing 
3. The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging – Kissmetrics.com
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging/ 

Optimizing your website to rank well in Google’s organic search results has always been a cat and mouse game. Marketers attempt to game the system, and eventually Google pushes back by updating their ranking algorithms to reset the clock. Their latest set of algorithm tweaks, codenamed “Panda”, contains some of the most controversial changes the company has ever made. Ultimately, Panda improves the quality of search results delivered to Google’s first page for any given query. However, the fallout from Panda is still being felt across the web months after its release. 

Panda In A Nutshell

Introduced earlier this Spring at the end of February, Panda was meant to address a very specific concern for Google: content farms. Content farms like Ehow, Mahalo, and Associated Content serve up “niche” material that’s often of poor quality. The sites themselves rank highly overall for non-niche searches due to this niche exploitation strategy. The net effect is to lower the quality of search results all around. Panda is targeted at removing the “niche loophole” for content providers both large and small. If you want to rank highly for a search term no matter how obscure nowadays, your content must be top-notch. 

Google’s Short Term Goals

Google’s primary business model since Day One has been to display the most relevant content to their visitors regardless of what they’re looking for. For the time being, they’ve managed to stymie marketers and content farms like Cha Cha that provide low-quality material in niche fields. Google claims to take into account 200+ factors when ranking sites, so it’s difficult to know exactly what will boost your position in the results. Panda seems to place a higher value on backlinks and website reputation when determining how well a website will rank. 

The Fallout

Google Algorithm ChangePanda’s effects were felt almost instantly, as numerous “content” farms immediately saw their traffic numbers fall off of a cliff. According to rough estimates, Panda impacted up to 12% of websites in the United States in the first month alone.
Demand Media, a company responsible for a number of notable content farms on the web, has seen its stock price plummet since the Panda changes were rolled out. While some small websites have been negatively impacted by the changes, they’ve recovered a lot faster than Demand Media’s web properties in the past few months. 

What It All Means

With Panda, Google is trying to allow the most valuable and useful content to rise to the top and take over the highest search rankings possible. In the long run, this is good for both consumers and producers of digital content. The same basic SEO game plan still applies: create great content, promote it through social media and organic search, and ultimately reap the rewards. At the end of the day, the best way to navigate the choppy seas of SEO is to get a well-respected search engine optimisation company to do the heavy lifting for you. That’s one area of E-commerce where it makes sense to farm out the hard work to the professionals.

On Tuesday, Google announced that signed-in users will, by default, be routed to the SSL version of Google (https://www.google.com)
This sentence written by one of the most respectable SEO’s in the industry Mr.Rand Fishkin generated big quakes in the SEO world.
Now, you’re asking why? You think, it’s just SSL protocol, some people used it before this move by Google. You’re partially right, but just partially.

Main idea behind this (at least according to Google) is to provide enhanced privacy to Google users, not showing their searches and so on.
“Less important” change after this update will be that the average webmaster (me including) will not be able to see some of the keyword data anymore (cause it’s considered an intrusion into user privacy, right?). Yeah… not so much.

However, Google in his all-knowing wisdom decided that the user privacy has a price (isn’t that always the case) and with simple adwords account you can still see all the data that you could before this so called “datapocalypse“. Yeah, just give Google a “few bucks” for ads and voila, everything you need for your deep keywords analysis is available.

Now, this move from Google triggered very negative reactions from the SEO community all over the world. Webmasters are complaining that they now have crippled data with those “Not Provided” keywords that can’t give them accurate data for their deep keyword researches and modifications. Of course, this will not influence all of your organic data. Google estimates that only 10% of all keyword referral traffic will be “Not Provided”.

Now, there is another side to the coin, something that just a small number of webmasters thought about. This update doesn’t have to be that bad actually.

If we consider what the phrase “signed-in users” exactly means, we can see that in this case it stands for the person with customized SERP to match his or her search history and social activities. To explain further, by removing those results that are “polluted” by mentioned influences and Soc.Media variables (how many social media accounts are linked, how engaged with social-search their connections are, etc.) Google is giving us only relevant, clean keyphrases that are served directly from its main algorithm. And that’s the stuff you want to optimize for, since 90% of visitors will still find you in that manner.
What more can you need for you precise analysis, research and site wide alterations?!

This, of course, this is just my personal opinion, and I would love to hear what you have to say about this turmoil, positive or negative, so ladies and gentlemen, comments are all yours.