Does my website have an Exact Match Domain or a "brand"?
-
I'd like to get some input from the Moz community about the domain name I use on a travel website I run as a hobby. I got heavily whacked by an update in September 2012 which some have said was because my site is an EMD. Others said it was because I had poor quality backlinks (but in fact I hardly had any). With the benefit of hindsight, I'd love to know what really happened.
The website is www.traveltipsthailand.com (now www.asiantraveltips.com) and the "brand" I use is "Travel Tips Thailand.The traffic penalty I incurred was around 80% and despite a LOT of work overhauling the site and trying to build some better quality links, I don't believe it has really recovered much. It ranks for non-competitive, low-traffic key phrases (which means it's not penalised as such), but struggles to rank anywhere meaningful on any phrase likely to drive traffic to the site.
At this stage I really just want to know whether to persist with the site (it's heartbreaking, to be honest) or drop it an build something new from scratch. I monitor the site's progress using Moz Pro, so I can see all the search ranking, authority and backlink data.
-
Hey Tony,
Thanks for following up like this. I think Asian Travel Tips is a much better, more brandable, domain than the other ones you have listed.
Google may tell you that you don't have a "manual action" while you may have an algorithmic one. The people on the team you contacted (at the time it was called Google Webmaster Tools, but whatever they're calling it this week) probably have no way of knowing whether your site has an algorithmic penalty, or is being given lower rankings algorithmically.
Generally speaking, fewer domains is better than lots of more niche microsites if they're all part of the same theme - in this case travel to Asia. Here is a post about this concept:
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killingHere's what Rand has to say about it:
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/rebrand-or-redirect-my-site-consolidate-multiple-sites-whiteboard-fridayI had a look at the screenshot you sent and the site looks good. Keep posting unique, useful content about traveling throughout Asia and you should be fine. I like that you're leveraging the Trip Adviser connection, as it adds trust for the user.
Good luck!
-
For anyone who stumbles across this post and wonders what happened, I did what I suggested above and scrapped the old domain, broadened the site content to South East Asian destinations and registered a new domain http://www.travelnasia.com. I have recently changed that to http://www.asiantraveltips.com which I had sat on all the time worrying about penalties if I used it. So far so good. Traffic from Google these days is much higher than for the old site so I must have done something right.
-
What's really bizarre, Gary, is that Moz reports that I rank at 16 for "traveltipsthailand" on Google US, but looking at it today I couldn't find an entry anywhere in the top 100.
I have another connected domain "asiantraveltips.com" which also does not rank but has not manual penalty notifications. I say connected, because they cross-link to each other.
I know it's not a server-wide penalty or C-block action because I have other sites on the same shared hosting account that are ranking OK and holding PR2 or PR3.
My only recourse now would seem to be to migrate all my Asian travel content onto a new domain, kill the old ones and all links and start again. It really is getting that desperate. But I'd still like to know what I did wrong to deserve this mistreatment by Google. FYI I rank bloody well on Bing, for what that's worth. On the phrase "traveltipsthailand" I rank #1 and on "travel tips thailand" I rank #2 and on "thailand travel blog" (my other brand term) I rank #5. So it's purely Google that hates me.
-
Thanks Richard, I will look for your direct reply.
-
Hi Gary, that's been my concern all along. I have actually asked Google twice about penalties and both times they have responded that I have none.I am running Cloudflare CDN on my site to speed it up, but having trouble with some critical plugins (like Wordpress SEO) when I run full compression. Still tweaking. My links are mostly "travel tips thailand" or "thailand travel blog" and I don't really rank for either. But I do rank well for my domain name.
-
It concerns me that doing searches for snippits of text on your site in Google, show much weaker sites first.
Such as "We love to visit Thailand when ever we can and we always"
and that you do not rank for "traveltipsthailand" as one word. this screams penalty when you see other sites like statistic sites ranking. Yours is 83rd!
Can you confirm you have checked Webmaster Tools for any alerts or warnings?
If your link building efforts have been based on those words there is a good chance you are being devalued for them, but to me something more serious is going on.
Not that it should be an issue related, but I do find your website is a little slow to load than most.
-
Well after a quick look, your links are pretty weak. You have a lot of ground to cover to get back to your original rankings but it should be do-able since you have a pretty strong domain name and age.
I will send you a PM with a little more info
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
"Avoid Too Many Internal Links" when you have a mega menu
Using the on-page grader and whilst further investigating internal linking, I'm concerned that as the ecommerce website has a very link heavy mega menu the rule of 100 may be impeding on the contextual links we're creating. Clearly we don't want to no-follow our entire menu. Should we consider no-indexing the third-level- for example short sleeve shirts here... Clothing > Shirts > Short Sleeve Shirts What about other pages we're don't care to index anyway such as the 'login page' the 'cart' the search button? Any thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ant-Scarborough0 -
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve0 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Your typical blog disclosure. "We received a free product but are not financially compensated".
Good afternoon & Happy Friday! I've ran into the following disclosure multiple times on different blogs. It seems to me like it would be a red flag and counter productive for both the blogger and the brand sending the samples as "free samples" are subject to google link scheming. Am I correct? What are your thoughts on bloggers using this disclaimer in regards to SEO? Disclosure: Some of these products were samples provided to me to try. Opinions and the choice to review are 100% my own! I was not financially compensated for writing this blog post. This post contains affiliate links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
What counts as a "deeper level" in SEO?
Hi, I am trying to make our site more crawlable and get link juice to the "bottom pages" in an ecommerce site. Currently, our site has a big mega menu - and we have: Home > CAT 1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
SUBCAT 1
SUBSUBCAT 1
PRODUCT Our URL Structure looks:
www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/subsubcat1/ and here are the links to the products but the URL's look like: www.domain.com/product.html Obviously the ideal thing would be to cut out one of the CATEGORIES. But I may be unable to do that in the short term - so I was wondering if by taking CAT1 out of the equation - e.g., just make it a static item that allows the drop down menu to work, but no page for it - Does that cut out a level? Thanks, Ben0 -
SEO value in baclklink from blog.domain VS domain
Will a back-link from "domain.com/abc" and "blog.domain.com/abc" have same value from an SEO perspective? Assume same article written on both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
I have been told the bots look at the domain value and the only links from blogs that have less value are in case of comments. As long as the "blog.domain/abc" page includes a full article and not a blog comment then it counts fully for SEO. Is this correct?0 -
301 redirect from one domain to other domain, How To?
Hi, I need to redirect 150 products pages from http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ How can I do this? Is there a tool or anything I can do to do 301 from one domain to another one? Can I use Google Webmaster Tool? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak1