Late Friday afternoon, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, dropped a bomb on some webmasters and SEOs.

He announced on Twitter that Google is going after “low quality” exact match domains (EMD) to ensure they do not rank well in the Google search results. Matt said this algorithm update only impacts 0.6% of English-US queries.

He has two tweets on this, here they are:

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012

Honestly, I am a bit surprised it took Google so long to do this. I mean, Matt said publicly that Google will look into exact match domains almost two years ago. I would have thought Google would have done something shortly after. Maybe they have and maybe this is just an update to that? I am not sure. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone going after the exact match domains.

I believe Google was slowing pushing this out a few days ago, on Thursday night. I saw an uptick in SEO chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread but I really didn’t think it was Panda or Penguin related, which it wasn’t, so I decided to wait it out and see what I could find out over the weekend. It was this, an exact match domain algorithm change.

It seems like many sites were hit, as many webmasters have reported being hurt by this update. A WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters claiming to be victims. I will do a poll on this in about a week, I don’t want to poll our readers until they have time to investigate if they were impacted by this. But it seems pretty significant, especially for SEOs and domainers.

SEOmoz has some early data on who was hit and how many sites were impacted. They say it seems like a pretty big update and shared this chart via mozcast:

Anyway, this is a special weekend report – I rarely do this but hey, I am offline Monday and Tuesday.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google Webmaster Help and DigitalPoint Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: September 28, 2012
  
  This week I covered how Google Maps App lead designer was so upset with Apple Maps first attempt. Google said penalties might not result in ranking downgrade. Don’t submit…
• Google: A Manual Penalty Might Not Result In Major Ranking Decline
  
  Typically, if you get a penalty and your rankings drop, you assume when the penalty is lifted your rankings return.
  
  Often that is not the case…




• Google Trends & Insights Now The Same
  
  Google has announced they’ve merged the Google Trends and Google Insight tools into one tool under Google Trends at google.com/trends…




• Google+ Local Pages Not Showing Categories
  
  Yet another Google Local bug to report.
  
  Jade Wang from Google said in a Google Places Help thread there are confirmed reports on the categories not showing up on Google+ Local pages.
  
  Jade explained, “It seems that categories are not appearing on some local Google+ pages…




• Yahoo’s New Contextual Ad Program Launches
  
  Yahoo is relaunching their efforts at offering contextual ads at contextualads.yahoo.net.
  
  This has nothing to do with the Yahoo Publisher Network they shut down in 2010. Instead…




• Googler’s Car Hits 149009 On Google’s Birthday
  
  Kimberly Johnson, a User Experience Researcher on Google+, snapped a picture of her mileage on her car on Google’s birthday yesterday. Yes, that is right, it hit 149009. Almost at 150,000 miles is o

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Videos with pre-roll ads not playing, YouTube Help
• Bing is finding hidden folders on server, WebmasterWorld
• EU To Charge Microsoft Over 2009 Browser Choice Breach, WebmasterWorld

This week I covered how Google Maps App lead designer was so upset with Apple Maps first attempt. Google said penalties might not result in ranking downgrade. Don’t submit multiple reconsideration requests. Google AdWords is no longer allowing duplicate Sitelinks landing pages. Google Trends and Insights are now one. Google allows 2 AdSense ads on smart phone pages. Google AdSense for Mobile is earning publishers more recently. Yahoo launched a new contextual ad program, but not with Bing, instead with Media.net. Google News turned ten years old while Google turned 14 years old. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

For the original iTunes version, click here.

Search Topics of Discussion:

• Google Maps Designer Blown Away By Apple Maps
• Google: A Manual Penalty Might Not Result In Major Ranking Decline
• Did You Submit Multiple Google Reconsideration Requests?
• Google AdWords To Enforce Unique Sitelinks Rule
• Google Trends & Insights Now The Same
• 3 Google AdSense Ads Per Smart Phone Landing Page
• Google AdSense Mobile Click Through Rates & Earnings Increasing?
• Yahoo’s New Contextual Ad Program Launches
• Google News Turns Ten Years Old
• Happy Birthday Google! 14 Years Old Now.

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Typically, if you get a penalty and your rankings drop, you assume when the penalty is lifted your rankings return.

Often that is not the case, especially when it comes to link penalties.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has two statements from John Mueller from Google which explains why that may be the case.

First let me quote his post:

The primary manual action that is affecting your site is that these unnatural links are being ignored. This is more or less in line with the spreadsheet that you have submitted, and would generally not be affecting the other links to your site. That said, while these things may have been counting for your site in the past, they no longer are — so it’s possible that you’d see some effect in your site’s crawling, indexing, and ranking. Past that, keep in mind that the manual action here might not be the strongest element affecting your site’s performance, we use over 200 factors in our crawling, indexing, and ranking, and regularly announce updates. My recommendation would be to not focus so much on this specific manual action, but instead to work to make sure that your site (and how it interacts with users and the rest of the web) is the best it can possibly be.

Now let’s pull out two clauses:

(1) The primary manual action that is affecting your site is that these unnatural links are being ignored. Yes, when links that were once counted in your ranking are no longer counted and never will be counted in the future, that will have an impact on your rankings for a long time.

(2) Keep in mind that the manual action here might not be the strongest element affecting your site’s performance, we use over 200 factors… Now this statement is more interesting. John is saying that a manual action might not be the reason his rankings are not doing well in Google.

John is saying that even if he didn’t have a manual action his rankings still probably wouldn’t be all that great.

I love the transparency in this post.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Google AdSense Mobile Click Through Rates & Earnings Increasing?
  
  A WebmasterWorld thread has Google AdSense publishers saying they have noticed their mobile earnings have increased nicely.
  
  They also compare click through rates by phone versus tablet versus desktop…




• Google AdWords To Enforce Unique Sitelinks Rule
  
  Google recently expanded AdWords sitelinks and have thus announced they will soon enforce the rule to have unique sitelinks show up per sitelink.
  
  Google’s existing policy has required each sitelink in a campaign to link to a different landing page…




• Meet The Replacement Google
  
  Google posted on their Google+ page a link to the Replacement Google at replacementgoogle.com.
  
  
  
  If you try it, Google takes you to a completely non-sensible search result. For example…




• Google Trends In Web History Temporarily Unavailable
  
  Google users are complaining in the Google Web Search Help forums that the “trends” link within their web history is no longer available…




• Happy Birthday Google! 14 Years Old Now.
  
  Today is Google’s 14th birthday, well some would say their birthday was on September 7th, but Google changed their birthday several years ago to be on September 27th.
  
  To celebrate…




• Gangnam – Psy At Google Korea
  
  Googler, Hugo Barra went to Google Korea to launch the Nexus 7 and part of the launch, the famous rapper Psy visited Google Korea as part of the launch. Here is a picture of Hugo & Psy together. He

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Google Engage for Agencies: upcoming changes to AdWords promotional credits, DigitalPoint Forums
• Is Content Authorship really that required ?, WebmasterWorld
• LinkedIn Introduces Endorsements, WebmasterWorld
• Marissa Meyer Outlines Some Of The CEO’s Future Plans For Yahoo, WebmasterWorld

A WebmasterWorld thread has Google AdSense publishers saying they have noticed their mobile earnings have increased nicely.

They also compare click through rates by phone versus tablet versus desktop. Since I just added ads to our smart phone templates, it is hard to compare any of these metrics but I did post some stats over here showing tablets have more than two times the click through rate than desktop or mobile devices. That stat seems to be the norm – others are reporting similar findings in the thread.

But many are saying they earn more from mobile and tablet users than they do from desktop users.

You can access this report in AdSense by going to the “performance reports” and clicking on the “platforms” link on the left. My RPM is highest with tablet users but lowest with high end mobile users. You?

I believe the commenting engine below allows you to attach screen shots.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

Google posted on their Google+ page a link to the Replacement Google at replacementgoogle.com.

If you try it, Google takes you to a completely non-sensible search result. For example, I searched for [iphone] and Google returned [Does Canada have Sonic restaurants?]

Too funny.

Clearly Google is mocking the NFL’s replacement referees.

How do you like the Replacement Google?

Forum discussion at Google+.

Googler, Hugo Barra went to Google Korea to launch the Nexus 7 and part of the launch, the famous rapper Psy visited Google Korea as part of the launch. Here is a picture of Hugo & Psy together.

Hugo said this is Google Gangnam Style.

Of course, there are shots of Schmidt and Psy dancing together.

If this is the first you are hearing of Psy, like me, see his Wikipedia page.

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.