Hit hard by EMD update, used to be #1 now not in top 50, what can I do?

[btrr69]

We have what I think is a pretty good site, unique articles a few widgets, lots of reviews, decent enough bounce rates and user times (60% and 2:15) based on drupal. Previous updates haven't touched us and an almost identical duplicate (same site compltely different content) of the site targetting a different but related EMD is unaffected which provides a control.

I have seen some discussion on it having to do with link profiles. We did pay some backlinkers to link to us, much more on the site that has dropped, and quite a few for a partial match keyword. I'm supposing this is a lot of the issue. If we try and delete these backlinks will it make the situation better or worse?

I have also notice some duplicate content warnings in seomoz that weren't there previously.

Any ideas?

[Static_Shift]

Hey btrr69...If you put up a link to your site it will be easier for us to analyse the specifics and give a more helpful answer. There are a lot of factors at play, and Google also released another Panda update around the same time as the EMD update which may have affected you. Without seeing your site it's hard to answer accurately.

[btrr69]

Hello Karl, thanks, here is a link to some data: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v201/jamtart/pp.jpg - i'll try and keep it off this thread.

Traffic dropped on Sept 29 the day of the update. The dupe content warnings are from Drupal nodes with no content on them and predates this. There is also a Drupal metatag being placed on each page which is being read as duplicate.

I wouldn't call it a thin site at all, we had facebook likes every other day (although seomoz isn't picking this up).. no ads or adwords, no products for sale, just a largish product review site.

[Michael-Goode]

Hi btrr69, by looking at your OSE data every single backlink you have (except 1), has the anchor text of "whey protein". There are a total of 76 links containing that anchor text. I am getting the feeling that you might actually be punished by Penguin.

Anchor text should be super diversified, with only about 30% of total links containing either your brand name or chosen keywords.

If I were you, I would change as many anchor texts on those links as quick as possible.

[btrr69]

thank you very much, those are my thoughts as well. I'm also a little confused here as seomoz is saying we're not in the top 50 but we've "only" lost 66% of our traffic and comparing before and after the same keywords are getting traffic, just less, consistent with dropping rank a bit, but not being wiped out like seomoz is saying. I also rang someone who had never searched our site before just now to ask whether we were on the front page at all and we were.. maybe google is jumping us around intraday?

[btrr69]

If it's going to be hard to delete or change this anchor text, is diluting it with new better, nice safe links going to help? Or is changing this literally the thing that needs to happen now?

[Static_Shift]

Yip, I'd be looking at your anchor text for sure. too much keyword rich anchor text mixed with an EMD is a bad sign to Google. Diluting it with high quality links with varied anchor text (not always with keywords of course) is an option if you can't change the anchor text yourself. Of course quality linkbuilding isn't something that just happens overnight. You really need to work on a linkbuilding strategy that builds natural links.

I agree with you that the site content is not thin, it's quite a useful site. But beware of spam signals like repetitive exact-match anchor text for your internal cross-linking.

I haven't delved too deep, but I noticed on the article "Protein powder and weight loss" you had cross linking with the anchor text "weight loss" 8 times. And I've seen "whey protein isolate" linking many times in articles.

This could be seen as a low-quality signal by Google. You should keep it down to a couple per page, and maybe change up the anchor text a bit. Such as interchanging "Whey Protein Isolate" with "WPI" or "Whey Protein Isolate (WPI)" or interchanging "weight loss" with "losing weight" or "fat loss" etc.

[Michael-Goode]

In regards to your ranking being incorrect on SEOmoz, it has happened to me before.

The best way to check what your current ranking are, is to use either incognito mode on Chrome (Ctrl+Shift+N) or "private browing" on firefox. By using either one, it ignores whether you are logged into gmail or not, as well as cache and a bunch of other things.

Otherwise you could also use Rank Tracker by SEO Powersuite, but even then I prefer to just manually check my rankings myself.

[Michael-Goode]

In regards to diluting your link profile with new and better links is indeed possible as mentioned by Karl. However, this will be a massive job that will take ages to do.

Consider the following: a good standard of having either brand-name or exact match anchor text is about 30% of your overall link profile (I wish I had that article to show you, forgot where it was). Now currently, you have 76 out of 77 links with the exact anchor text of "whey protein". In order to get those links into the 30% of your overall anchor texts in your link profile, you would need to create A LOT of new high-quality links.

My best advice is to either change as many anchor text as you can, or just get rid of the backlink if it's on a low-quality page.