Migrating EMD to brand name domain. Risk of Penguin Penalty?

[lcourse]

We would like to migrate from an EMD to a brand name domain, since our service offer has become much broader than indicated by the current EMD. The current domain name is a money keyword.

Do you believe there is a big risk of suffering a penguin penalty if we go ahead with the domain migration, due to large share of anchor texts containing keyword of old domain name?

Quick facts about our site:
-about 500.000 pages indexed by google

• PR6

• 10 years old

• 1200 linking root domains
• 30% of linking root domains contain our domain name with domain ending as anchor text
• 5% of linking root domains have just the domain keyword as anchor text

Any thoughts? 
Thanks

[brad.s.knutson]

Migrating to a branded domain is probably the best step to avoid a penalty at this point.  Get away from the EMD and over-optimized anchor text ASAP.

If your domain is penalized, it won't be your branded domain - it will be your EMD domain.  It's hard to say if it could be penalized in the future, but it hasn't been yet, so you might be OK.

I assume that you'll 301 redirect all pages on the EMD to the new branded domain.  You should be prepared to put in a lot of effort to clean up the anchor text of the EMD link profile, or completely disassociate the old domain in the event of a penalty.

[lcourse]

Thanks Bradley.

Yes we plan page level 301 redirects from old to new domain and will follow best practices for domain migration.

I am afraid changing anchor text clean up of EMD may have only limited success in our case since many links are very old and some sites may not be maintained anymore. However targeting especially the 5% links with keyword as anchor text may be good idea to try.

Having to disassociate the old domain  and losing 10 years effort of clean link building would probably mean that we would need to close down the company as our segment is too competitive to get a new domain quickly up in the rankings. So therefore I really want to understand the associated penguin risk as well as possible.

[brad.s.knutson]

If you are seriously concerned about a penalty which could result in your business having to close it's doors, you should probably be seeking out help from an agency rather than looking for free advice here.  If the situation is that dire, then getting an audit and quote from an agency will probably be your safest bet at this point.

[lcourse]

To clarify, our link profile is very clean, but naturally people used the keyword from the domain name and the domain name to link to us.

It really comes down to the question:
How will google penguin value anchor text to the old domain and will 301 to new domain increase the risk of a penguin penalty.

Anybody with experience of migrating an EMD? Anybody experiencing Penguin shortly afterwards?

Certainly would be useful to consult with someone specialized in penguin recoveries who has dealt with a very large volume of penguin cases and learn about their impression of this risk.

[MickEdwards]

It probably depends on the anchor.  If the EMD was bluewidgets.com, then 'http://www.'bluewidgets.com' or 'bluewidgets.com' or 'bluewidgets' type anchor should be ok.  If there was a high level of 'blue widgets' I would start to be a little concerned.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi,

"To clarify, our link profile is very clean, but naturally people used the keyword from the domain name and the domain name to link to us.

It really comes down to the question:
How will google penguin value anchor text to the old domain and will 301 to new domain increase the risk of a penguin penalty."

It's not the exact match anchor text that makes the Penguin algorithm affect a site.  If you have natural links and those links contain exact match anchor text then that's a good thing.

The reason why the percentage of exact match anchors is stated by many to be a risk factor for Penguin is because sites that have built spammy links generally, in the past, did so with exact match anchors.  For most sites that have not had manipulative backlinks made, the most common anchors will be variations of the url and brand name.  If you've been building your own links in the past though, the most common anchors are often keywords because that's what used to work.  So, many people assume that Google looks at the percentage of keywords as anchors when deciding whether Penguin is going to affect the site.  I don't believe that that's what happens though.

Penguin is way more sophisticated than that.  The goal of Penguin is to find self made links and devalue them.  The reason for this is that Google wants only links that are truly natural citations to count towards rankings.  For some sites, if there's the odd self made link then when Penguin rolls around they probably just lose the link equity they once had.  But, if there are LOTS of self made links detected then  this sends a signal to Google that your links cannot be trusted and your site will not be shown as highly in the SERPS.

So, if the links are natural then don't worry about it, even if they do contain a keyword as anchor.

[lcourse]

Marie, thanks a lot for clarifying.