Towards the end of September last year, Google released a penalty dubbed the ‘Exact Match Domain Update’ that targeted domains with (what Google considered to be) keywords in them. It’s now over 9 months on and many webmasters are still struggling with their rankings. While we were fortunate enough for our clients to escape a penalty, many of our own websites were hit, giving us a great opportunity to test various methods of recovery. So how did we remove the Google EMD penalty?