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Only on Google, Yahoo and Bing are not effected, no updates were made in particular, especially not to every site, but it happened on the 5th around the time of a Google update. also all 4 lost sites were 3 keyword EMD's with dashes, which we are thinking might have been the cause after doing some research on recent updates? The site not effected was not an EMD and was an authoritative original version.

It is a shame Google never make it clear what they mean by 'low quality content' as I believe like many others the content on my effected sites were of a high standard, i.e informative, well written, updated etc. There also appears to be different levels of EMD - regards how many key words they contain, how many dashes, if they are .com .net etc.

Also the age, authority, page rank of the site might have a bearing.

With this is mind if a site gets wiped off at what point should someone try to recover it, obviously if a few positions are lost its fine, if its below page 100 then it probably requires a different response.

I would say from reading people's comments from the last week that many people have dropped several pages simply due to the EMD update.

I wouldn't agree >Carlos, Google officially say they are changing the weight given to EMDs, 'tweaking' the algorithm. But if you read people's comments on the results it seems quite widespread and many people's sites with good content they have worked hard on and rely on as a business have simply disappeared. It is not the case that SERPS have been mildly re-adjusted, but in many case disappeared all together, for all SERPS.

When the effect is like this it renders a person's business useless. In that case should they blindly look for good links, improve content for a non disclosed google set of 'rules' and try to please google, without even knowing what they did wrong in the first place regarding content.

In some cases the fastest way to recover the business (not the URL) might be to start a new URL, move the site and start linking. If the site was not so established before, this would probably be the fastest solution in many case, instead of waiting patiently in case google change their minds.

After some research I would say my site have been hit by an EMD penalty, it seems many other people have faced the same.

It would be very useful to know how to deal with this, many topics discuss the reasons behind it, but few have a realistic response for fast action.

I am in two minds - one would be to try and improve content etc, but this is subjective and could take any amount of time, or never resolve the issue.

The other would be to move the content to a new URL, which poses the question, should I do a 301 redirect, or would this just transfer the penalty?

If no redirect, then I am proposing starting fresh - as the sites hit by EMD penalties are deemed 'low quality' this might be the fastest way to recovery.

If I move the old content to my established main site as a sub folder, would this cause any problems?

Many thanks for people responses.

Hi there are a few things which are strange that make me unsure of the reasons for the drop regarding the links

Firstly it happened to all our 'foreign' language URLS at the same time. All were on a different URLs with different IPs but shared the same coding and template, however we thought this was fairly normal for many websites who have different language versions.

Secondly we did not receive any warnings from Google on webmasters.

Thirdly the drop happened to all our key words, there is nothing even close to 50 on the SERPS now, but the sites are all still indexed.

The original English website has been left untouched.

Hi,

Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links?

Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this.

Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP.

Many thanks.

Quime.

Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th

Hi all,

Another suggestion was given for our fall in SERPS.

Recently Matt Cutts announced that EMDs would be hit by new algoritms.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-20-15789.html

Only our site with exacts matches...

cours-telephone-anglais, curso-ingles-telefono, kurse-englisch-telefon, and corso-inglese-telefono

were hit.

Does anyone else have experience of this?

Would a solution be to create new URLS and redirect? Or would a redirect carry the penalty over? Is there anyway to fix that sort of penalty?

Many thanks for your help.

Hi thanks for the reply,

Should we not have any shared scripts, how can we avoid this, just by removing them? Ideally we need the pages the same, but with different language versions, while not being punished.

I will make all the changes you suggest.

The Geo-targeting was not done for all, but we did it today.

The drops were on Google regional and com search engines.

Would these changes lift the penalties, or are they more permanent sometimes?

You would not suggest subdomains and moving the foreign pages to the main site?

Also I have just been told that having 'dashes' in the URL has become an issue, has anyone ever heard of that??

Many thanks

Hi, thanks for the reply,

The sites were interlinked, (a link at the top going to the other language pages on each)

There was link building involved to a greater or lesser extent, the Italian page not for several months, the French and Spanish quite recently.

They are hosted on the same host account but on separate I.P addresses.

On the webmasters we have not seen any messages warning us of anything.

Hi all,

We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages.

This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages.

However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped.

Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites?

The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same.

How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case?

We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k.

Many thanks for your kind help.

Quime.