The May Day Google Update
Gooogle made an update recently dubbed “The May Day Update” that has rang some bells in the SEO community. The main complaint is that it has shrunk the amount of traffic coming into websites as a result of long-tail searches. Most websites didn’t see a drop in their rankings for their more important keyword phrases. Some websites, my dental internet marketing website included, actually saw a bump in results. There is only speculation as to why some have gained and others have lost. Google hasn’t confirmed or denied any of the theories.
One theory is that the drop in traffic isn’t really a result of Google changing the way it handles long-tail searches at all. It’s a result of Google further devaluing links from sketchy websites or websites of low importance. This means that websites that saw a drop after this update are simply seeing a drop in their rankings as a result of losing some of the links that maybe shouldn’t have counted before in the first place.
Others (See Tedster’s theory in this Webmaster World discussion thread) say that it is indeed a change in how Google deals with long-tail phrases, but only inasmuch as it has changed its phrase match methodologies. Meaning that if someone typed in “Denver seafood restaurant quiet dinning Lodo”, rather than just showing results that match individual keywords, it may be identifying phrases within the long-tail search, in this case, “Denver seafood restaurant” and displaying indexed results that are relevant to that entire phrase.
Another theory is that Google is just culling some pages from its index that it deems not important enough to take up space in its memory in order to keep the speed increase up that it has seen as a result of its Caffeine update. This would mean that if your site was getting traffic on some of its ancillary pages from long-tail search phrases, it’s not that Google has changed how it’s displaying results for those phrases, it’s that those pages of your site are just GONE from Google’s index, so they aren’t showing up anymore.
Whatever the cause, if you’ve seen a change in your traffic from long-tail search phrases, stop and take stock of your traffic. How much has it dropped? Be sure to look a month or two before May 1st and compare it to now, bearing in mind that not quite a month has passed since the May Day Update hit. Do a site: search on Google and see if you have fewer pages showing up in Google’s index. Use some internal link building to donate some link juice from more important pages to some of the long-tail content that was dropped from the index so that Google may re-include them. Acquire some more high-quality links to replace some of the low-quality links that Google may have discounted. Above all, just make sure that your SEO strategies are focusing on sound, white hat SEO techniques. If you’re doing that, you’re less likely to feel the sting of these updates. In fact, most algorithm updates will help you!
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Guest Posts | seowhitehats | May 17, 2010
“Most websites didn’t see a drop in their rankings for their more important keyword phrases”
Neither did my sites: they neither gained nor lost traffic. I think with this update Google would start discounting backlinks from low PR sites. A parallel theory is that this algo change would also help Google weed out junk sites from the search results, though how far that is true only time will tell.