My big issue with this is if a site gains natural links, which is what googles looking for then those that link to a site will use the sites domain name.

One of my sites hit by penguin has lots of links I havent asked for that have the homepage KW within the anchor text because its the domain name. Most sites will also link to the homepage giving credit to my site again with the domain name even though the article does not relate to the homepage.

To dilute this i would need to gather links as you have mentioned above with different anchor text. This is when i would be trying to manipulate search engines which makes it impossible to please google.

Maybe I should change my domain name although I love it?

Thanks for the article.

We have seen this with a few penguin casualties with what on first glance looks like a fairly okay anchor text distribution. Mostly with sites with a two keyword exact match domain so…

Example:

http://www.my-keywords.co.uk

Where the most popular anchor was ‘my keyword’ then we are still seeing huge drops in traffic on this keyword and variants after penguin.

This is fairly easy to diagnose in google analytics

– set the time period for the two weeks after penguin (24th April for round 1)

– set the compare against date as the two weeks before

– view Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

Now, view the differences and you will most likely find the keyword (my keyword) at the top showing at big drop in organic referrals. If you don’t have analytics you can do the same thing in Google webmaster tools and look at the specific keyword over the date ranges and the traffic drop easy enough.

So… exact match is fair game for penguin and these linking strategies in this post are a really strong suggestion.

Good article. 🙂

Further – you will likely see G making adjustments based on the age of the site.
Thus a new site with a KDN/EMD will get only a slight benefit, where as a site after a year will likely see more.
The logic is simple enough – within a set timeframe, G will be able to ascertain with the site is legit or spammy. Only after it has acquired a degree of trust will G treat the DN as more influential (no different than it does the content).

Got any proof that Keyworded DomainNames have the same threshold as non KDNs?
I would have thoguht that G had accoutned for such things,
and find it a little odd that the all sites posses the same cap/limit – despite the DomainName/Brand etc.

Now, I’ll admit, I don’t know the answer to this one – but I will try to find out. Yet whilst I’m doing that, I’d love to see some stats/figures that prove that EMD/KWDNs are being treated no differently.

If a site is obviously trying to abuse one keyword by linking it everywhere within their site, Google should have a different way of picking that up.