Penguin, Panda and Exact Match Domains

by Rob Maas - MarketBizz

Despite the Penguin and Panda Updates, we still see a lot of occurrences of Websites in the top of SERPs (Search Enginge Result Pages) that use tactics that were supposed to be dealt with by those algorithmic updates. (and manual actions)

But: They are clearly visible interlinking between all kinds of their own EMDs  (Exact Match Domains) and EMCD's (Exact Match City Domains) and sometimes have 1000's of domains with low quality content (Doorway Pages) just trying to manipulate and dominate the Search Results.
And it looks like they succeed!  Their pages do appear high in the rankings, sending out a completely wrong message to other WebMasters who think  they should copy them to be successful too.

So what's going wrong ?

Here is a summary I derived from answers and remarks that John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst and acknowledged (by me at least) spokesman on Search Quality  gave in hang-outs and on the Webmaster Central forum. 

• Google always tries to show the most relevant search results.
• The fact they are showing up does not mean they don't suffer from a algorithmic ban or manual action. 
• There could be lots of other factors that makes them show so prominent  even despite our actions.
• It's frequently possible to find businesses that are successful doing things that are against our webmaster guidelines, but we don't think that means that you need to do so in order to be successful, nor that it's a good idea to do it.
•  There are a lot of similar sites that ended up having to live with several months with very little search traffic, and ultimately ended up significantly redesigning their sites to avoid being seen as doorway sites (some even trying the legal route).

Such tactics can work on the shorter and even the longer run, but the chances  that you are going to be caught by the next update, increase with every update. The massive amount of work you have to put up with to overcome the penalties and manual actions on those extra  domains would better be spend on building a better main website.


So my conclusion; Don't do it, don't try to outsmart Google, put your efforts in building websites according to the WebMaster Guidelines.
That is the only long term strategy that will survive.

Author: Rob Maas - Rob@Marketbizz.nl