Google recently rolled out yet another update to wipe out some of the internet marketing websites that people were trying to make money with. This particular update was targeted directly at crappy websites that were targeting a specific keyword by using the exact keywords as the domain name itself.
Basically if they were targeting the keywords cheap plastic kites, they would have been using the domains cheapplastickites.com or cheapplastickites.org or cheapplastickites.net or God forbid cheapplastickites.info.
The .info sites just make me giggle a little bit because it is so hard to find one that isn’t pure crap.
If you are a student of SEO then you already know that is definitely does help to get your site ranking higher if your site has one or more of your targeted keywords in the domain. If you can’t get it in the domain itself, then you want to at least have it somewhere else in the URL structure. At least that is what you should do if you want that extra SEO bonus.
You can still get sites and pages to rank well without doing that, but having the keyword in those places makes it take less work to get a top ranking.
This Google update is just one more nail in the coffin of that old niche site business model where the website owner is more concerned about ranking and profits than they are concerned about the visitor. In case this is the first blog post you have ever read from me, let it be known that I am a firm believer in building sites specifically to benefit the visitor. I don’t do that because I am some “holier than though” internet marketer. I do it because I learned years ago that doing that is actually a better, more profitable business model than just thinking about your own profits for the site.
In my experience, you make more money with the site if you completely forget about profits while the site is being built and simply focus on the visitor benefit. If you can create enough visitor benefit, then shortly thereafter you will be able to profit from your site handsomely. That is how I build sites now. That is the basic underlying principle behind the kinds of authority sites I build.
If your site was hit badly by this particular Google update, then let this be a sign for you that maybe you should try something different. Building authority sites would probably be a very successful business model for you.
If you weren’t doing anything bad with your site and you got clobbered by this Google update anyway, then yeah I definitely feel bad for you. I have been there. I had a great earning website get clobbered by Penguin in early 2012 that was unjustly demoted in my personal opinion. But, what can you do?
I have said before and I will say again that Google really doesn’t care about any of us. They honestly don’t. They do what they want whenever they want to do it. If you don’t like their policies all you can really do is choose to not use them and choose to convince other people not to use them also. That is the only punishment you can pay them back with.
There are still SEO methods out there that are working very well for Google and the other major search engines. Those methods don’t involve using EMD’s as a tactic. There are also ways that you can increase the amount of referral traffic to your site so that way you don’t have to rely on Google traffic alone. And the funny thing about this referral traffic is that the same things that help you get more referral traffic are the kinds of things that lead to higher rankings in Google over the long run. So, you get both referral traffic and more search engine traffic. Check it out.
Were you hit by this EMD update at all? If so, what was your experience?
