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The latest Google algorithm update called ‘Mayday‘ has caused much frustration with webmasters. Google makes hundreds of tweaks per year to its algorithm (the way it ranks websites) and often these go unnoticed, but this latest update has got many website owners in a spin. In a nutshell, Google is placing more emphasis on the quality of pages within sites which may not have been deemed as important as other more prominent web pages.
These pages, often buried a bit deeper into sites such as individual product pages or article archives often get found for what is known as the ‘long tail searches’, which are often very specific niche searches usually consisting of 3 or more key phrases. Google is now placing more emphasis on the quality of those pages and if they don’t have a huge amount of relevancy to a search as some other pages, or contain poor content, the rankings for them are dropping.
Many websites rely on ‘long tail’ searches for a significant amount of traffic, so you can imagine that this is causing problems for some websites, particularly e-commerce sites. This means website owners need to spend more time raising the quality of the content of those pages, perhaps with customer reviews, additional content or improved product descriptions, linking to related products etc.
You can read more about this update on Search Engine Land, and also follow the link from the article to the video on YouTube where Matt Cutts (Google’s Search Quality Engineer) talks a bit more about the update.
(NB This post first appeared on the Forty First blog, but I thought as it was an important update, to reproduce it here for our Savvy Marketers followers)
Sam, Thanks for this post. I’ve been extremely frustrated as of late with a few of my clients not being patient while Google irons this out.
Do you know how often these kind of changes happen? Is it at random? Or do they have some kind schedule?
Debbie
Hi Debbie, Yes it’s very frustrating when Google makes changes to its algorithm! It also means rankings fluctuate and if improvements are needed to the site then takes even longer for rankings to bounce back!
There have been a few major updates over the last 3 years, mostly yearly, but there is no set pattern! Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm, some changes are so minor they’re barely noticeable, then a major update like this one comes along and upsets the apple cart! Last year the main update was Mayday (around June 2010), before that was Vince, around March 2009. Mayday was similar to the recent Panda update in that it focussed on quality of content, although Panda has been much more heavy handed.
Hope this helps!
Indeed it does Sam! Thank you so much.
I really lean on your expertise and continually learn from you!
Debbie