So it was Panda Afterall
End of last week Matt Cutts tweeted about an Exact Match Update targeted at low quality exact match domains.
Forums started to buzz with sites being wiped out and dropping like stones.
Just after the weekend I noted on my Twitter account that I didn’t see much damage to all the keyword rich domain names that I would track and keep an eye on. By and large these are decent quality, with time and money invested in them. Some of the poorer quality exact match sites that I test had been blitzed by Penguin.
I thought that there must be something else going on, and it turned out that at the same time a new EMD update was happening Google was also releasing a new Panda update. This was the most likely cause of alot of the carnage.
So Exact Match Domains live to fight another day. Provided they’ve decent content and are without all the throwaway signals why shouldn’t they hold relevancy and navigational benefits.
Google keeps webmasters and website owners in the dark albeit temporarily, even when livelihoods are at stake. It’s a waking up call for all businesses that are reliant on Google and the organic traffic that it provides.
Just for the record Google’s Guidelines have been updated and there’s more on link schemes here.
