Google updates are coming more and more regularly, which isn’t unexpected – Their results have been getting “worse”, and they want to improve their user’s experience as much as possible.
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Although the efficacy of their updates is debatable at best, with some even wondering if their “Don’t Be Evil” motto still stands, or if they just decided to totally jack up the results in order to make an extra buck or two with AdWords.
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Now the thing is, Google’s business is to deliver the best results possible to the end users, and untill their search engine is perfect (which will never happen of course) their updates will come more and more often. This is a reality that we SEOs must understand.
With all the fanfare and madness around every single update Google does, my position still stands.
If you are waking up every day dreading the fact that might just have lost all your rankings, you’re most likely doing SEO wrong. At the same time if you are one of those guys that goes around in forums & blogs spamming that SEO is dead, well then it might just be better if you quit SEO altogether.
First, SEO is bigger than Google, albeit Google is undoubtably the largest organic traffic source, it’s not the only one. It shouldn’t at least.
There are so many sources of traffic, so many engines that give out traffic, even if in smaller quantities. At the same time, if you _only_ get traffic from Search Engines, you’re also doing SEO wrong. SEO has grown to be much more than just Search Engines. In a way it’s strange, since its called Search Engine Optimization, but the truth is that Social Marketing and SEO are so intertwined nowadays, that a full separation of the two is nearly impossible.
Anyways – Exact Match Domain updates. Most of the targeted sites were low quality EMDs, or sites that merely ranked for something based on their domain strength alone, not on their content. As we all know these are 99.9% owned by Affiliate Marketers that decided to earn some easy cash with theses domains, so it’s no surprise that Google targets (yet again) IM’ers.
The Good news is that EMD’s still rank, and they still rank easily, just stop outsourcing your content at 0.02$ a word to third world countries and you’ll be fine for the most of it.
If you’ve already been hit, and you’re wondering if you can come back, the answer is maybe.
The usual rules apply:
- Remove poor quality content from your site
- Add more and fresher content
- Remove all the nasty spamlinks
These 3 simple steps should take you a long way into recovering your lost positions on Google.
What have you done in order to recover your rankings after this last update ? Any tips or advice ?
