In early March, just after the big Google update that slammed some of the big article directories, I reported that I had not seen any noticeable effects on my portfolio of sites.
It is now over two months later, so I thought I would revisit that group of sites to see how they were faring now.
The overall result has been steady. Adsense earnings are about the same and within the normal variability I have seen over time – March was slightly up on February and April was slightly down on March.
Looking more closely at individual sites has revealed some interesting things.I have two exact match domain sites where the target keyword phrases were two word phrases. I know this goes against my blueprint advice to pick minimum three word phrases to target, but sometimes you just have to take a punt!
Anyway, for both of those sites I had top 10 rankings for the target phrase, which was producing reasonable traffic and clicks. For ONE of the sites, sometime in April its ranking plummeted to over 500 when searching for the 2 word target phrase. Since then it has come back to about 80 – still a long way from its previous top 10 position.
The site is still getting traffic from other long tail phrases related to the target phrase. How do I know this? I use a rank tracking WordPress plugin that emails me when someone visits my site from a Google search. So it looks like this site has only been Google slapped for the 2 word target phrase.
What about the other website based on a two word exact match domain? No change – the top 10 ranking for this site has been holding steady since the Google update. Also, other exact match domain sites based on three word target phrases have also been holding steady.
So why has this one particular site been affected, and why only for the particular keyword phrase that matches the domain name?
I’ve got no idea. It would be interesting to here some other people’s experiences since the Google update in February.