I've had a copule of USA sites drop dramatically recently.
I saw this in a newsletter today. It covered things like content farms but this bit could be relevant to a few forum members...
quote]Exact Match Domains Affected As Well
Earlier in the month Google also released an algorithm change that shook things up as well. The earlier changes appeared to be similarly focused and had similar results. However, there apparently was another focus from what we’ve observed in the extensive number of domains we manage. The trend that we saw was that EMD’s or Exact Match Domains and even domains that were not exact matches but had partial keyword matches were affected by the algorithm change (and not for the better). Many have complained about EMD’s for a long time now that they were given far too much favor in the rankings and apparently Google is listening.
Apparently Matt Cutts of Google made some comments in a speech back in November that he thought that exact match domains where getting too much credit in the rankings and that they would be looking into that in the next few months. Well, looks like they have. Now, we have seen varying degrees of impact. Some very minor, just losing a couple of spots down the page and others losing 30 to 50 placements. As always, domain age, authority and other metrics clearly have a significant influence as well, but it is clear that EMD’s value has been degraded. Furthermore I would extend that speculation beyond just EMDs and say that the benefit of having your primary keyword in the domain at all has been impacted. I say that because we’ve seen it first hand on dozens of sites and very few of them were exact match domain names, but they all had their primary keyword(s) in the domain name.
Another observation that we have seen is that site age seems to have more relevance now as well. Many of the sites and keywords that we analyzed that dropped a couple of spots were almost always newer than those that were now ranking above them. Again, there’s a lot that goes into the “authority” equation and age is just part of it, but in the update that hit a couple weeks ago, it seems to have been given a slightly higher weight.
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