If you’ve been near any Internet Marketing forums and blogs recently, you’ll be aware of the general panic and despair over Google’s announcement that Exact Match Domains (EMDs) are being targeted.
As usual, there’s the typical fear and loathing from many people who don’t properly understand what the change was all about.
It pays to go straight to the source (Matt Cutts), to see what he actually said.
The initial tweet from Matt said:
[success]”Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.”[/success]
I’ve bolded the words “low-quality”.
Now you could argue what “low-quality” actually means, but one thing that is certain, is that it’s not a blanket change affecting all EMDs.
All my EMD micro sites have stayed pretty much static in their rankings.
Certainly plenty of people have reported big rises and falls in their rankings, but I don’t think that can be attributed directly to the Google EMD update.
Gregory Smith on Twitter was highly critical of the change, until they got the following clarification:
[success]Matt “Multiple algos are rolling out all the time. Likely those sites weren’t affected by EMD update but by another algo.”[/success]
[info]Gregory “Thank you matt but all this happened during the past 3 days. Has another update happened during this time?”[/info]
[success]Matt “yes. 500+ algo launches/year mean 1-2 a day. I know of at least one other algo rolling out over same timeframe for example.”[/success]
Read that last response again.
Google makes over 500 changes to their algorithm each year!
The bottom line is if your rankings change drastically, don’t look at the cause in isolation. In almost all cases, it’s going to be a combination of factors.
Cheers
