You've put your finger right next to THE big question, brinked - how does this update measure quality? It's too soon to have even a hint of that answer, but I'm looking hard.

my big question is how the heck did my non EMD domain get hit by this update?

I am not going to even think about how google measures quality. That will lead you down a long dark path if you start to try to figure out googles complex nature.

For example, if you were a machine, you would think google.com is low quality. It is a blank page with 1 field on it. You cant make a machine determine what quality is. I can take a picture of me doing a shadow puppet, slap it on a domain and have a massive cult following that finds that to be a true work of art, a real high quality webpage to these followers. But google will never understand that.

I think in my case a low quality stamp goes into my site navigation and how it flows. Google might feel well I am having a hard time finding the content on this site, its very choppy, I am sure users will have a hard time too so this is a poorly constructed site that I will label as low quality.

Some thoughts:
1. Does this update give an advantage to 'so called' high quality EMDs over others?
2. If KW in domain name could be a weakness, the all domain-name industry is going to shift.
3. If KW in url could harm, some powerful SEO methods passed away.

I've lost around half my traffic since a sudden change in results about 24 hrs ago. Very weird patterns though with some phrases ranking well and others that were top 3 completely gone even with adding the domain name in the search.

This is not an EMD and I see it across several of my domains. None were affected by panda or penguin.

I hope it is just a partially processed update.

I have a non EMD domain that has been decimated...after holding the same rankings for years...but I've been monitoring my keyword rankings and they keep moving around a lot, but staying between like pages 20-40, used to be top 5 in pg 1.

its clear this update has pulled some non EMDs in as one of mine has lost 30% of its traffic ...although two EMDs have gone through this fine

There are lots of people talking about UK and other tld's I am pretty sure at the moment it is only USa affected as per Matt Cutts' tweet. So if you are in another TLD then it probably isn't the exact match update that is causing you trouble panda 3.9.2 has been rolled out and is probably still making itself felt around the web. That would be my guess as to what is happening to a lot of these sites. I have an exact match domain that is doing better and is in the USA TLD. However it lost all its image traffic so overall traffic is down. Google is mixing it up at the moment and I think they are doing on purpose just to make it harder for us to guess what is happening.

3.9.2 was back on Sept 19th. That is not what I am seeing in the serps. I am seeing sudden changes in the last few days for serps I watch. All EMD's have not been hit. This is a really rough guess but I would think maybe 50% or so got hit.

I am seeing the EMD rollout outside of the US.

My travel site seems to have been hit by this.

What I'm trying to figure out is what they mean by "exact match" domain. My domain is Keyword1Keyword2Keyword3.com Less that 7% of G traffic comes from phrases that contain all three keywords, which is what I would consider an "exact match".

Right now, this update is a joke. Am seeing a junk site ranking number 1 in a highly competitive niche. There is really nothing worthwhile on this site. When you think about the hours you put into writing high-quality content and get slapped for unknown reasons, it's pretty discouraging and frustrating. I hope all this is just temporary and those who got affected unfairly will make a recovery.

I've searched for my site under all the keywords and phrases where I featured highly on page 1, and have been pushed down to page 2 or 3 or sometimes lower. For my main key phrases, I ranked number 1 for more years than I can remember (now on page 3), and the top site is a hyphenated three word domain using those three keywords, and then uses them throughout the site. Makes a joke out of Google's intentions.

So depressing to see a quality website such as mine, with years of hard work poured into it, pushed down below badly written sites, with poor, short articles, written solely for Adsense. Mine was written long before I joined Adsense, and is my passion - I would continue with it, with or without making a revenue, but of course the revenue really helped me out financially until now.

In the image search I'm also pushed completely out of things, but depressingly my photos appear on blogsites at the top of the results, that have taken and used them without my permission.

The winners in my UK niches are, of course, the brands. The level of brandspam has reached even higher levels than ever before and anyone looking for serious information rather than the usual 150 words of boilerplate are wasting their time. What a sad 'search' engine this has become.

Im not sure if this update has hurt a lot of my site, of cause i have what the sites are about in the domain also,but that does not mean the sites are crap, thats just how it was years ago, so users know from the start what the site is about, I was never thinking SEO and is google also not able to just ignore seo factor in domain, in stead of punish people.

it seems very bizarre to punish a site in this way. imagine punishing a cooking program for having the words "cookery show" in the title. or a TV listings magazine for having the words "TV guide" in the title.

Punishing the content of the site, i can understand, if it's low quality. but marking a site down because the title tells you what it's about? isn't that what we're supposed to do?

Punishing the content of the site, i can understand, if it's low quality. but marking a site down because the title tells you what it's about? isn't that what we're supposed to do?

Agreed. Perhaps Google is just cleaning house by wiping out millions of sites this way and then will tweak again for those left standing to right things? Don't know, but the scale at which Google operates at is daunting by any measure and since I only have a tiny fraction of statistical data to draw upon, foolish of me to make hard fast conclusions about what they're up to.

Panda was about low quality. Why were EMD's not affected by that? Or, to rephrase, if they were why the need for an extra update or algo to deal with them? My emd has been affected. It's in no way low quality. A very innovative design with well written cntent. Not a massive site and only fairly recently re launched but it's tip top quality. It's UK though so perhaps its drop is due to something else as supposedly this update is contained to USA only at this stage

Shouldn't the tweet read "small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality in search results."?

This is insane. A low quality website is low quality, regardless of its domain name.

And what if you just created the website? Does this mean it is automatically out of the results? Or should people just slam a fist on the keyboard and then register whatever comes out?

This google punishment strategy is clearly getting out of control...

This change seems to be heavily oriented towards the travel sector (which Google apparently seeks to dominate both on its own account and in coordination with TripAdvisor). I see high quality sites with exact matches going down on the first page and disappearing completely in a few cases. In contrast, in our other sector, rare books and maps, none of our sites nor those of our competitors have changed position.

@Jez123

It's UK though so perhaps its drop is due to something else as supposedly this update is contained to USA only at this stage

This update is more than the US, my EMD's .uk domains have been wiped out.

Over the past while I had noticed EMD's did not have the power most people say. What the diference I notice with my EMD has been that there are a lot of users search on G for the EMD's.com.

If a company sells and specialises in one product 'Blue Widgets', is it not fit to call that company Blue Widgets and have a website called BlueWidgets.TLD?

I have always thought that the people who complain about an EMD are the people who never thought of buying it themselves. The unfair advamtage that I see, is you know if you are going on a site called BlueWidgets.TLD you are going to get Blue Widgets.

[edited by: courier at 12:06 pm (utc) on Sep 30, 2012]

Panda was about low quality. Why were EMD's not affected by that?

Yes, why not? I would also like an answer for this.

(UK) Too early for an in depth analysis but some of my sites affected are EMD, some are not - some were previously affected by Panda 2.1 but had recovered. Overall this is the worst hit I'v ever taken.

Matt's use of the word phrase "low quality" is very disingenuous. The fact is that Matt and G- have no idea if your site is a quality site or not. What Matt means is a site that somehow fits a pattern that G- has identified as common with spammers that they want out of the search results. It has nothing to do with the quality of the individual site.

Just had a look at my money term EMD, around 3,000 pages seems de-indexed, on site comand.

This is the worst day for me of checking stats. Has anyone stopped to think that it's the image search that is the result of your loss of traffic? In all my instances I'm suggesting it's image traffic loss. Just another possibility especially if there is more to it that just the EMD.

Here's the thing.

google.com is an EMD, so is apple.com and firefox.com. And what's with the apparent nuking of domains that are not EMDs?

Bunch of monkeys with STDs working at Google. And no, I have not been hit by this update.

What's the fix for this gong show update for folks who have been affected? 301 to not-a-widget.com ?

Riiiiiiggghht.

Two of my EMDs, one of which had the #1 spot for its keywords, are completely gone while one other has not been touched and one other has actually moved up from #6 to #2 for its keywords.

Makes no sense.

If these Exact match domains were low quality, why were they ranking to begin with? Wasn't panda supposed to take care of low quality websites?

I have 1 exact match domain that I put up for a local service provider, and it ranked #1 for its EMD term and it still ranks #1 for its EMD term after the EMD update. And it is actually not that great quality but I guess google loves it for some reason.

Its so weird yesterday, many of my sites got hit, like example we have one site not panda/penguin hit and not dependent on google image, goes down 50% Saturday.
Then I have another which is Panda hit since April 2011 which is dependent on google image, it has also seen 50% less visits from google image, so what going on and how can it be that a lot of sites get hit at the same day and not all are in the same category.

I'm seeing dramatic SERP shifts here in the UK over the past 48 hours. A lot of poor quality sites have been completely removed from the first few pages, and Google appears to have finally produced a relevant set of results in my sector.

Fortunately, my EMD appears to have done very well indeed from this update:

5 money terms on pages 1 - 2
10 long tails on pages 1-2

I'm even seeing homepage + inner page on pages 1 and 2 respectively for a very competitive search. That never happened before ...

1 EMD site of mine looks great on bing and yahoo, +/- 1 possition, but in google, the site went crazy, was on #5 now i cannot find it.