Does my website have an Exact Match Domain or a "brand"?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

I'd like to get some input from the Moz community about the domain name I use on a travel website I run as a hobby. I got heavily whacked by an update in September 2012 which some have said was because my site is an EMD. Others said it was because I had poor quality backlinks (but in fact I hardly had any). With the benefit of hindsight, I'd love to know what really happened.

The website is www.traveltipsthailand.com (now www.asiantraveltips.com) and the "brand" I use is "Travel Tips Thailand.The traffic penalty I incurred was around 80% and despite a LOT of work overhauling the site and trying to build some better quality links, I don't believe it has really recovered much. It ranks for non-competitive, low-traffic key phrases (which means it's not penalised as such), but struggles to rank anywhere meaningful on any phrase likely to drive traffic to the site.

At this stage I really just want to know whether to persist with the site (it's heartbreaking, to be honest) or drop it an build something new from scratch. I monitor the site's progress using Moz Pro, so I can see all the search ranking, authority and backlink data.

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[RichardSEO]

Well after a quick look, your links are pretty weak. You have a lot of ground to cover to get back to your original rankings but it should be do-able since you have a pretty strong domain name and age.

I will send you a PM with a little more info

[gazzerman1]

It concerns me that doing searches for snippits of text on your site in Google, show much weaker sites first.

Such as "We love to visit Thailand when ever we can and we always"

and that you do not rank for "traveltipsthailand" as one word. this screams penalty when you see other sites like statistic sites ranking. Yours is 83rd!

Can you confirm you have checked Webmaster Tools for any alerts or warnings?

If your link building efforts have been based on those words there is a good chance you are being devalued for them, but to me something more serious is going on.

Not that it should be an issue related, but I do find your website is a little slow to load than most.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Hi Gary, that's been my concern all along. I have actually asked Google twice about penalties and both times they have responded that I have none.I am running Cloudflare CDN on my site to speed it up, but having trouble with some critical plugins (like Wordpress SEO) when I run full compression. Still tweaking.  My links are mostly "travel tips thailand" or "thailand travel blog" and I don't really rank for either. But I do rank well for my domain name.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Thanks Richard, I will look for your direct reply.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

What's really bizarre, Gary, is that Moz reports that I rank at 16 for "traveltipsthailand" on Google US, but looking at it today I couldn't find an entry anywhere in the top 100.

I have another connected domain "asiantraveltips.com" which also does not rank but has not manual penalty notifications. I say connected, because they cross-link to each other.

I know it's not a server-wide penalty or C-block action because I have other sites on the same shared hosting account that are ranking OK and holding PR2 or PR3.

My only recourse now would seem to be to migrate all my Asian travel content onto a new domain, kill the old ones and all links and start again. It really is getting that desperate. But I'd still like to know what I did wrong to deserve this mistreatment by Google. FYI I rank bloody well on Bing, for what that's worth. On the phrase "traveltipsthailand" I rank #1 and on "travel tips thailand" I rank #2 and on "thailand travel blog" (my other brand term) I rank #5. So it's purely Google that hates me.

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[Gavin.Atkinson]

For anyone who stumbles across this post and wonders what happened, I did what I suggested above and scrapped the old domain, broadened the site content to South East Asian destinations and registered a new domain http://www.travelnasia.com. I have recently changed that to http://www.asiantraveltips.com which I had sat on all the time worrying about penalties if I used it. So far so good. Traffic from Google these days is much higher than for the old site so I must have done something right.

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[Everett]

Hey Tony,

Thanks for following up like this. I think Asian Travel Tips is a much better, more brandable, domain than the other ones you have listed.

Google may tell you that you don't have a "manual action" while you may have an algorithmic one. The people on the team you contacted (at the time it was called Google Webmaster Tools, but whatever they're calling it this week) probably have no way of knowing whether your site has an algorithmic penalty, or is being given lower rankings algorithmically.

Generally speaking, fewer domains is better than lots of more niche microsites if they're all part of the same theme - in this case travel to Asia. Here is a post about this concept:
https://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing

Here's what Rand has to say about it:
https://moz.com/blog/rebrand-or-redirect-my-site-consolidate-multiple-sites-whiteboard-friday

I had a look at the screenshot you sent and the site looks good. Keep posting unique, useful content about traveling throughout Asia and you should be fine. I like that you're leveraging the Trip Adviser connection, as it adds trust for the user.

Good luck!