Exact match domain homepage not ranking for brand name

Hi,

A website I work on has dropped from the SERPS for the homepage, the site is an exact match domain which is also the brand name. There are no wanrings in webmaster tools.

Things i am doing:
Adding more static content to the homepage.
Checking the htaccess file
Gaining high authority links

Has anyone else had any similar issues, i am racking my brain to work out why just the homepage has dropped. Any solutions would be gratefully recieved.

 

Google's been hitting over-optimized anchor text pretty hard as of late, that could be an issue. Try building some links with more diverse anchor text and see if that helps. Example: Let's say your keyword is "free hammers". Instead of having your anchor text be "free hammers" all the time, try throwing in stuff like "cheap hammers" or "where can i find a hammer" and even more general keywords like "click here" and "more info".

 

It depends on the domain/brand.
If it's a widely used meaningful word or words, you can hardly get it ranked.
If it's a meaningless word or words, it can be the #1 search result with almost no effort.

 

I Accept @makeit easy words Incase if you build junk of links pointing to your EMD then it might can hurt your rankings be sure to build links for others pages too

 

I've been through this with EMD's also - it's seems hit and miss really. You have to tread very carefully while SEO optimizing an EMD site. Since your main keyword is already present in your URL, it's best to use it very minimally in your anchor text and within your site's content. Is it a .com domain or other? I seem to have much more success ranking .com EMD's than .net or .org. Of course, a lot of other factors come in to play as well - not just the fact that it's a EMD site.

Try using this free On-Site SEO SEORCH Tool to find any on-site issues - this might give you a little more insight to what's going on.

 

Combine Makeit easy and shelby78's answers and you have your answer. When it comes to EMD's it really can be hit and miss AND the brand or EMD matters. If your EMD is besthikingboots.com then you're more likely to be penalized using the EMD anchors as opposed to a branded domain name of bappos.com because your EMD anchors double as keyword anchors.

These days I don't use keywords in anchors at all unless there are a lot of words surrounding it. ex. "luckily we had the best hiking boots money could buy on that rainy day"
Google understands what your content is about. Spamming or what seems like spamming with EMD anchors will get you slapped these days.
I like to make sure the bulk of my links are surrounded by relevant content but with very generic anchors that have no keywords whatsoever and add some backlinks with long anchors that include keywords in the sentence like the example above on domains with higher PA/DA, also surrounded by relevant content as well. Its a winning combination.

 

Yeah this has been happening to me as well. I'm just leaving everything to nature as for now.

 

Using over SEO data is always spammy !! Write articles in natural ways, think you are writing your opinions for people not for search engine bot. If people love they will share, recommend & bookmark your website. Then search engine will notice these activities and your page will ranked well.

Remember If your article is relevant, useful, not irritating with over use of keywords, people are loving your articles then search engine will also follow them, this is core recipe of search engine ever.

According to recent Google updates EMD's trend specially for affiliate marketing is not like in past, Google's maximum effort is to serve most useful & user acceptable results. Also there is no any bad effect on EMDs but they are treated as usual domains. May be keyword of your EMD have more competition you need more efforts & more rich content to stand on top results.