Comments on: Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic

By: pmid

pmid — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:25:57 +0000

This is a great post and has thrown light on something that’s been troubling me for the last month. My online business has suffered significantly (traffic down 50%) and it seems this is the culprit.

My business is not completely dependent on this FREE traffic, but we have enjoyed the benefits for many years. For such a big change, which it appears Google has openly admitted, perhaps they could have given a bit of notice that it was going to happen.

It’s also true that many of the ecommerce pages that now out-rank us are essentially identical to ours. If we were considered more relevant before, and the content is essentially the same, why have we been penalized and these other pages haven’t?

@Peter Bird: Thanks for your words of encouragement and sympathy. You’ll excuse me if I don’t pass these on to the people that I have to lay off as a result of Google’s changes.

By: nikos7121

nikos7121 — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:56:26 +0000

@vanessa : regarding amazon.. It seems like they’re profiting from the enormous gap opened by google with the rel attribute.

for ex:
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C

useful to get all the juice from affiliate links…

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:55:48 +0000

For those who are affected by this change, they should put valuable contents on pages of higher quality. Or start to make those pages with good value (high conversion, profitability) more “important”

By: osovictoria

osovictoria — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:53:08 +0000

Oh yes, this change has affected my wittle bitty ecommerce shop on a particular site. As the SEOist says I’ll puff up my twitter, facebook, and blogging as a marketing tool to hopefully overcome this minor glitch. Thanks for the info!

By: Clifford Bryan

Clifford Bryan — Sat, 29 May 2010 02:29:20 +0000

Thanks for the information. I was mostly involved in creating content for a political website before this Caffeine-May Day update started. I think the fact that there was so much noise during health care on the internet. Has more to do with why Google has been making changes in algorithm than most people know. The discourse was highly volatile and bordered on being dangerous. Since this update started things have sure quieted down. The Obama administration is pretty tight with Google. I think they stretched out the length of update at the minimum because of the political atmosphere.

By: naja2183

naja2183 — Fri, 28 May 2010 21:25:02 +0000

This is a great post, thanks for thinking through the details, Vanessa!

Sounds like the same old thing you’ve always said- the hard work it takes building content will pay off in the end, for users and for search engines.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Fri, 28 May 2010 18:03:42 +0000

“The bottom line is, does it remove search engine spam?”

Almost certainly. But that is still just one escalation in an ever-escalating war between search engineering and search spamming.

My sites’ traffic is still up, but my Google referrals do seem to be down a little. The quality of linking content may indeed be a deciding factor in more ways than one. It seems I’m getting more referral traffic from non-search sites.

Is that because of this Google change or in spite of it?

By: Jeff Swanson

Jeff Swanson — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:52:31 +0000

This is pure speculation, but does anyone suspect that part of this filtering for relevancy was based on click-through-rates?

Google recently added CTR’s to Webmaster Tools, which indicates to me that they think it’s important for one reason or another. Perhaps, they are trying to tell us indirectly that instead of spamming pages with backlinks, we should worry about whether the users find you site to be relevant by clicking on it as a result. This would make title tags and meta-descr’s important, not for keywords, but as an advertisement to have someone click on your link.

Any thoughts on this? If you rank well for a long-tail term, but users never click on your result, I think Google has a problem with that. I realize you can influence CTR with black-hat techniques, but it has to have at least a minor role in my mind.

By: zhaiduo

zhaiduo — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:04:38 +0000

It’s very help to find the reason why my main keywords disappeared recently. Thanks.

By: Renaud JOLY

Renaud JOLY — Fri, 28 May 2010 05:41:44 +0000

Matt Cutts confirmed MayDay update during Google Search Conference wednesday in Paris. According to Matt, Mayday update is due to Google quality search team, not Matt Cutts’ team.