How to deal with EMD penalty?

[Quime]

If think many people were effected, when you search 'EMD penalty' you get 496,000 results. The question is how to respond to a huge drop in SERP, and sometime a business can not afford to make changes and wait and see if google will reverse anything, because often this simply does not happen.

[Quime]

I think one thing that is clear is that there are no clear answers, you can trawl through sites. forums, blogs etc, and find 100's of conflicting suggestions, reasoning and advice. I agree that the EMD update was not classified as a penalty, but I think if you dig a little deeper you will see that some legitimate websites were severely hit by this update, mainly in niche markets on relatively new websites. Agreed that this is often down to bad content, but not always. Could it be that the update is not actually that accurate in finding the exact 'spammers' that Google was aiming for. Of course people need to work hard, not take short cuts and do research, but sometimes there is more to it.

[SEOAndy]

SEO is not an exact science, that's for sure, but there are some things we can understand from looking at statistics and analytics and one of those things is that EDMs have lost some of their power and if you don't have good SEO to back that up, or you have 'slacked' on other aspects of SEO because your EDM was holding you up, then you are naturally going to see drops.

Like Carlos said, before the update having an EDM gave you ten points, now with the change EDMs only give 3 points, so if you aren't picking up points in other places, you are going to naturally see drops down the rankings.

[RobertFisher]

There is no correlation to search results and affected pages. Simply put, EMD also means electro magnetic discharge and many SEO's blogged about the EMD from Google without having necessarily experienced an adverse occurrence.

[RobertFisher]

I would say this,

Instead of saying how many, present one that has good content, etc. and was affected by the EMD and let's dissect it to see what we all learn.

[Carlos-R]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your kind words. I completely agree, if you own and EMD and have been doing things well you should have very little to worry about.

They say that bad things come in threes, I'm sure that the sites that have seen a dramatic drop in positions have been affected by more than just the EMD update.

SEO stuff was never easy, and now Google is making it near impossible for most people to get it right.

Cheers

[Quime]

it dropped to pretty much below 50 -70 after the 5th fro all its SERPS that were originally in the top 10. The English version was not touched. The written content I can guarantee is unique.

[andersvin]

This post is deleted!

[Carlos-R]

After the 5th of October? The EMD update was released on the 28th of September.

Funny enough, there was a Penguin update on Friday, the 5th of October. The impact of the EMD update on non English websites is very, very small if anything at all.

My money is on your website being affected by Penguin, not EMD

[Quime]

That what I would have initially thought but it took down all 4 of our foreign pages at the same time which have EMD, leaving the original site which has no EMD.

I am guessing that all effects of the updates don't happen exactly on the day

[edwardrj]

Keep in mind that many non-EMD sites were also hit around the time the EMD effect went into place. Some folks have claimed this result is very similar to the -950 "penalty" from a few years back