Mayday Update

Often a Google algorithm change is important enough that even those that don't spend lots of time targeting the procedures notice it. That looks to be the case with what those debating it at Web designer World have named Mayday.

Last week at Google I / O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who announced, when asked during QA, this is an algorithmic change in Google, attempting to find better quality sites to surface for long tail questions. It went thru powerful testing and isn't going to be rolled back. I asked Google for more specifics and they said to me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which appears to suggest that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are now not ranking as highly as before. Based mostly on Matt's comment, this change impacts long tail traffic, which typically is from longer questions that few folks search for individually, but in aggregate can supply a major percentage of traffic. This change appears to have basically impacted very big sites with item pages that do not have many individual links into them, might be a couple of clicks from the index page, and may not have significant unique and value-added content on them. As an example, ecommerce sites frequently have this structure. The individual product pages are not very likely to attract external links and the great majority of the content may be brought in from a manufacturer database. Naturally, as with any change that ends in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite. Based totally on Matt's comment at Google I / O, the pages that are now ranking satisfactorily for these long tail questions are from better quality sites ( or maybe are better quality pages ). My complete rumination is that maybe the importance routines have been changed a bit. Before, pages that did not have top quality signals might still rank well if they'd high significance signals. And maybe now, those high significance signals do not have as much weight in ranking if the page does not have the right quality signals. What's a site controller to do? It can be hard to create pressing content and attract links to these sorts of pages. My best suggestion to people who have been hit by this is to isolate a group of questions that the site now is getting less traffic and take a look at the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities have they got which make them seen as valuable? For example, I haven't any way to know how amazon.com has fared in this update, but they have done a reasonably good job of making individual item pages with copied content from manufacturer's databases unique and animating by the addition of content like of user reviews.

They have set up a reasonably tough internal linking ( and anchor text ) structure with stuff like advocated items and lists. And they attract external links with features eg the my favourites widget.