Long-Tail Search Rankings Change (a.k.a. Google’s MayDay Update)
If you hang out at any of the well-known forums that talk about website rank in Google, like webmaster world, – http://www.webmasterworld.com/google – you’ve no doubt heard about the MayDay update.
It first began when a variety of webmasters began to notice significant changes in their website traffic especially where long-tail keywords were concerned.
One site saw it’s traffic drop 50% over the course of a few days.
Another site saw 90% of it’s traffic disappear.
Some had smaller drops in traffic of around 10% while others saw no significant difference.
So what happened?
Initially when this was first discussed, it was simply a “theory” – but because it was happening on such a massive scale to so many sites, it soon became clear that something was happening although there wasn’t any official word from Google on what was actually going on.
Finally, after a few weeks, Google’s Matt Cutt’s did in fact, disclose that yes, there was an update to their algorithm that affected long-tail keywords and that this was a permanent algorithm change and it will not be rolled back.
Google doesn’t exactly tell us why some sites were affected and why some were not but Matt did re-iterate the same information he’s been giving for years. (see video below)
Matt states in his video “If you were affected by MayDay the sort of thing to think about is to go back and ask yourself ‘Have I got the highest quality site?’, ‘Am I showing up for the most relevant searches?’, ‘What sort of things can I do in terms of adding great content?’, ‘Am I making sure that people consider me an authority?’, that I’m not just matching something that’s off-topic or that users won’t find all that useful.”
So if you happened to see your site drop in rankings for some long-tail keyword search queries, take a look at who may be showing up for those search queries now.
- What are they doing differently that you could implement?
- Do they have more content?
- If so, what kind of content do they have?
- Where are they optimizing these long-tail keyword search phrases? And so on.
Make some changes on your own pages that you see some of your competitors doing and you might just see your listings start moving upwards yet again.