Exact Match Domains No Longer Rank As Well

Late Friday afternoon, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, dropped a bomb on some webmasters and SEOs.

He announced on Twitter that Google is going after "low quality" exact match domains (EMD) to ensure they do not rank well in the Google search results. Matt said this algorithm update only impacts 0.6% of English-US queries.

He has two tweets on this, here they are:

Honestly, I am a bit surprised it took Google so long to do this. I mean, Matt said publicly that Google will look into exact match domains almost two years ago. I would have thought Google would have done something shortly after. Maybe they have and maybe this is just an update to that? I am not sure. But this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone going after the exact match domains.

I believe Google was slowing pushing this out a few days ago, on Thursday night. I saw an uptick in SEO chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread but I really didn't think it wasPanda or Penguin related, which it wasn't, so I decided to wait it out and see what I could find out over the weekend. It was this, an exact match domain algorithm change.

It seems like many sites were hit, as many webmasters have reported being hurt by this update. A WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters claiming to be victims. I will do a poll on this in about a week, I don't want to poll our readers until they have time to investigate if they were impacted by this. But it seems pretty significant, especially for SEOs and domainers.

SEOmoz has some early data on who was hit and how many sites were impacted. They say it seems like a pretty big update and shared this chart via mozcast:

Anyway, this is a special weekend report - I rarely do this but hey, I am offline Monday and Tuesday.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

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More Retweets Lead to More Twitter Followers, Right?

Being a moderately analytical marketer, I should be pretty smart about assuming a correlation between two events that might not necessarily exist. And yet, for the past few years, I’ve foolishly done the opposite. Below is a chart of my Twitter follower growth from Followerwonk over the past 60 days:

The spikes are probably days when I’ve sent some awesome tweets that went viral and reached a lot of new folks who then clicked the “follow” button. What else could they be, right? What could cause large numbers of new followers if not highly successful tweet content?

Thing is, I’ve been getting very suspicious about this connection lately, so I decided to look at my most retweeted tweets over the last two months and compare it to the Wonk chart. Have a look:

If the chart above is too small, you can .

The results seem pretty clear. At least for the past 60 days, there appears to be virtually no connection between days of high follower growth and days of highly retweeted tweets. Perhaps shockingly, during some of those spikes, there are days when I’ve barely sent any tweets at all! The social media marketer in me is ready to pull his hair out with puzzling frustration.

In fact, the only day I can connect to any specific event is August 28th, when I spoke in front of several thousand marketers at Hubspot’s Inbound conference. That likely resulted in a higher than normal follower growth, but the other high growth rate days (August 20th, 22nd and 31st, September 10th and 21st, and October 3rd, 4th and 11th) don’t have any remarkable events to which I can connect them. Moreover, the days when I experienced very strong retweets are actually among the lower follower growth rate days.

My takeaway from this highly unscientific, tiny sample size study is A) I really need to stop assuming I know what correlates with growing a Twitter account and B) I need more data. I haven’t been able to find a study that shows what metrics/activities correlate well to high growth rates of Twitter followers (nor Facebook fans/likes, nor Google+ encirclers). There’s some other interesting Twitter studies out there (e.g. Beevolve’s, Dan Zarrella’s), but the specifics of growth rate for accounts is yet to be tackled (at least from what I could find). Maybe I can ask Peter & the Wonk team to look into this. If you know of any research like this, or are seeking a project that would earn a lot of links/shares/respect in the marketing world, please do share!

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Google's Disavow Link Tool: Their Best Spam Reporting Tool Yet

t is finally official, as promised Googlelaunched a disavow link tool yesterday afternoon. It was officially launched during the lunch with Matt Cutts at PubCon Vegas.

Yes, Bing launched one months ago so let's get that out of the way now.

Google's Best Spam Reporting Tool

My big issue, as I said before, this is not a win/win - this is the best spam reporting tool Google has launched to date. Suffering webmasters point fingers at their competitors and friends and blame them for their poor rankings, which Google can use.

Matt Cutts said repeatedly at PubCon, on the video (see below) and in the blog post that you should try not to use it, don't use it, really. Why? One example he said is do not disavow internal links - it can hurt. Right, Google is just using this as a "hint" or "signal" now, like they did with the rel=canonical when that launched, but this will be a powerful signal within 6 months - so be careful if you have to use it.

Will all SEOs use it when they need it? I suspect so. Will some stand up like they did with the nofollow attribute and say - no, we won't use it because it is a form of outing? I suspect so. But 99% will use it in a second if they feel they need it.

How Does The Google Disavow Link Tool Work?

Okay, now that you will likely use it, how does it work? Go to this page (currently not linked within webmaster tools) to see the sites you can disavow links for.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-link-tool-15848.html

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Google Releases Penguin Update 1.1

No matter that it’s late Friday night on the start of a three-day holiday weekend in the U.S., Google has just pushed out the first update to its recent webspam-fighting Penguin algorithm. Let’s call it Penguin 1.1.

Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data refresh” that impacts less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches.

Minor weather report: We pushed 1st Penguin algo data refresh an hour ago. Affects <0 .1=".1" context="context" english="english" of="of" p="p" searches.="searches." style="margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts)

Although webmasters and SEOs have been speculating consistently in recent weeks that Google had already pushed out a Penguin update (or several), Cutts specifically says this is the first update since Penguin launched back on April 24th.

Google has described Penguin as an algorithm change that’s aimed at webspam and, more specifically, “sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines.”

Penguin led to immediate outcries from across the SEO industry, with many questioning if it made search results better or worse. Because it’s an algorithmic change, Google said it wouldn’t consider reconsideration requests made via Webmaster Central, but it did setup a form for webmasters to use if they believe Penguin had hit their sites by mistake.

Even though tonight’s update affects a small percentage of English searches, that form is still online.

For more about the Penguin update, see the articles listed below.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: In the comments below, you’ll see some people wondering if they haven’t recovered from this update, does that means they’ll never recover and should start over. I’d wait a bit longer before that.

After Penguin 1.0 came out, Google said that anyone hit by that had been penalized. But soon after, there were examples of sites that didn’t appear to be spamming Google but which yet had traffic drops.

A few of these might have been false positives, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that when Google wiped out wide swathes of links, some sites that used to benefit from those links lost credit. In other words, they weren’t penalized — they just didn’t get as much credit as before.

I’m still trying to get Google to confirm this or not, if everyone hit by Penguin 1.0 was really penalized or if there were some who just don’t get as much credit as before, because others were penalized. Stay tuned.
Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-pushes-first-penguin-algorithm-update-122518

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Google’s Penguin Update Makes The Wall Street Journal

The Google Penguin Update is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web.

The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this month, down from $68,000 the previous month. Another small website owner saw roughly 30% of his traffic disappear over night. And another lost 20% of their traffic. Most of the article goes through small business owners who lives have changed for the worse due to this update. But there are some stories that lead me to believe they are not directly related to Penguin.

Again, there were several updates last month – Penguin was happened on the 24th. But there were two Panda refreshes, link network penalties, bugs and many more updates.

Even if all those cases were not Penguin related, Penguin is now main stream after hitting a major publication like the Wall Street Journal.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/googles-penguin-update-makes-the-wall-street-journal-121733

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