Has the Google “MayDay” Update Impacted Your Long Tail Traffic?
Google officially confirmed the “Mayday” update that happened at the end of April and beginning of May. Many webmasters that rely primarily on long tail keywords were the first to note the change and had a lot of questions along the way. Matt Cutts officially addressed this issue and answered some basic questions to help clear up what has happened. Here is a quick look at the recent Mayday update and how it could impact your website.
Long Tail Traffic
Matt Cutts was quick to point out that this update affected traffic from long tail keywords the most. Ecommerce websites have taken a big hit in many cases. The biggest reason for this is as Google has previously mentioned that a large amount of user feedback discussed the large amount of identical (or almost identical) shopping results that Google was producing. The issue isn't that Google has targeted ecommerce websites, but rather punished websites without unique or useful content.
This was most noticeable in ecommerce sites that only use the manufacturers’ description and internal linking to promote the specific pages. Along this line, it seems like domain weight is playing a lesser role than it used to and the individual page rank has become more heavily rated because the biggest impacts can be seen on “item pages” without many individual incoming links.
The MayDay Algorithm Change Is Here to Stay
There was initially a lot talk about an error that needed to be fixed, however this simply isn't the case. It also isn't Google manually slapping some sites. This was an algorithm change and it is not temporary. Google underwent all of the testing and committees that it does for every other update. Additionally, Matt Cutts pointed out that the Google algorithm gets modified around 400 times every year. It is also important to note that this was ONLY an algorithm change; no changes were made to the indexing or crawling. He also noted that this has nothing to do with ongoing Caffeine updates.
The Mayday update is here is to stay. At this point, there is nothing webmasters can do but continue to improve their SEO efforts. If anything, this update should, once again, drive home the point that you cannot put all of the SEO eggs in one basket. While a number of sites are reporting much lower traffic, this also means that there are a large number of sites receiving more traffic.
my traffic increased
Hah, I was wondering why at the beginning of the May my rankings went up. my traffic from Google increased 50%! I must be doing something right.
my rankings dropped
Well you must be happy now. i'm on the other side, my rankings dropped for my inner pages. Some of them were on the 1st page of serps and now are buried was down below 50th position. I'll try adding more content on those pages to see if anything will change.
Damn Google!
Everyone is talking about this update, how their rankings dropped or rose, and my rankings are the same. Now I cannot join the discussion. Damn Google! They left me out. LOL
It feels disappointing
My rankings also dropped in May for long tail traffic. It feels disappointing after so much work that has been done on optimizing. I spent hours and hours on building links, rankings were slowly rising and now this. Like someone slapped me in the face.
Post new comment