Google Mayday Update and SERP Changes
Well, it looks like the caffeine update at Google is finally spreading to everyone. In fact, at Webmaster World, its been coined as the Google Mayday. Take it for what it is… but the name is very fitting!
What Does Google Mayday and the New Search Results page mean to you, the website owner? Pay attention to your traffic and conversions more than ever… because it could mean a LOT!
What’s Going on with The Longtail Search?
Not sure how the longtail search is going to shake out in all of this, and since I focus a LOT on the longtail, it’s worth following on my end.
What seems to be affected? On several well aged (+5 year old sites) sites with hundreds, or even thousands of pages, many of those pages have very few links. Up until now, the long tail itself would drive traffic to those pages… I mean targeted traffic, on the long tail search phrase. Now, some of those same pages that were driving traffic 2 months ago (maybe just 100 visitors a month to a single longtail phrase) are doing nothing. And the pages, well, they seem to have dropped from SERP’s.
Could adding links be the fix? Not sure yet… there is also another issue…
Google Showing Longer Snippets in SERP’s
Not sure if anyone has been paying much attention to the search result pages… but “The Longer the Search, the Longer the Snippet” has been the rule at Google for several months, and their technology just keeps getting smarter!
It’s not that it’s anything new, but with the Google Mayday Update, they seem to have gotten smarter, and are showing even more information.
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Google Update in Full Swing – Quick Update
- Google, Accountability, Dealing with Huge SERP Drops.
- Google Caffeine Update in Full Swing?
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Mark,
No differences that I am aware of (yet) on my end. How about for you?
And, how are longtail searches changed with the new rollout?
Rochelle
I own a .net site that was getting 3000 to 5000 page views a day. The .com site (that I don’t own), typically gets about 2 million page views a month.
Yesterday, inexplicably, my traffic skyrocketed. At the end of the day yesterday, instead of 3000 to 5000 page views, I had logged 48,386 page views with 14,126 unique visitors. So far today, the traffic has only increased.
I did a search for the keywords, and the VERY popular .com website is no longer the first result or even on the first page of Google. My humble .net site is there. The .com site is sitting at around the 45th result.
Looking at a listing of their pages, I see they have virtually no SEO. They relied 100% on the name to draw traffic. The one thing that I did different than they did was make sure I had keywords in the page titles and in the content.
I never anticipated this kind of traffic and had no real moneytization set up. Adsense has always returned grossly unrelated and untargeted ads. I guess my biggest problem now is to find the best way to take advantage of that traffic. Any suggestions?
@Rochelle – I have some heavy changes on some sites Rochelle. (Like going from 250 daily pageviews to 2500 daily pageviews, ALL longtail & google driven!)
@Gary – Interesting, but generally the same trend many at WebmasterWorld are seeing also.
You know, you can target those adsense ads to specific topics! There is a VERY good read at: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=23168
I have used this on several sites when I see irrelevant ads… Write a nice section of content to trigger the targeted ads, wrap it with the tags and wait.
In a few weeks, you will start seeing the epc rise! :-)
Mark
My traffic has been all over the last 3 weeks. One site is getting 100 to 5k a day. Didnt think caffine would change things so much. Guess I was wrong again.
Hope this all shakes out soon.
I’m one of those affected..One of my promising websites had been growing 30% month-on-month and was getting about 6000 pageviews a day in March..The fall happened in an instant around March 17th..Since then, I have been getting just around 1200 pageviews..It’s pretty sad..
Mark, I do not get the suggestion you offered. What ‘links’ are missing on these pages? and what do you suggest we do to probably get back to ranking big?
@Bill G – Those are the same type of things I see mostly Bill… Up and down, up and down. HUGE fluctuations in traffic on different days.
@Anand Srinivasan – I REALLY don’t know what may help or not right now Anand. Deep linking from new and older posts, to older posts is just something to try.
The ONLY real conclusions I have come to so far…
– The site losing the most traffic, seems to be long tail driven (not seeing the thousands of “longtail” phrases in keyword stats from the same month over month info)
– The sites with the biggest INCREASES are much thinner sites, that were marketed heavily with articles, blog comments, etc. Almost like they are algorithmically penalized for crappy links already, and the new changes take some of the weight OUT of the picture.
M
Thank you Mark. I read through the entire thread and this is what I could conclude : Massive sites with thousands of pages, years of authority and thousands of IBLs have lost out which is ideally not a good thing. Because they have lost out, sites which are still building their authority (but are nevertheless well optimized) have taken the place.
As one forum member put it, this is probably a transition period where the new updates are being implemented which means the “trust factor” for authority sites have been temporarily turned off and naturally the long tail pages lose their place to smaller micro-niche websites during this period since the latter is well optimized. So once the update is complete and trust factor is turned back on, these sites will get back to their original position.
Now with a little over 1000 pages, I cannot say my website is on the same league as those web empires with several hundred thousand pages. However my website used to display Sitelinks on Google which is normally displayed against websites which are bonafide in the eyes of Google. So, I just hope it all becomes fine soon.
Hi all, I am also facing such problem. I don’t know who to get over it. My question is, should we keep optimize our site by doing offpage optimization? Or is it better to stop it for a while until the update completed?
Thanks in advance.
I’m fascinated by the rapid changes I’m seeing in analytics. If I didn’t need this income to pay my bills, I could be amused. About the time I think that my targeted keywords are not working anymore, it all shifts and my site starts coming up again. I remember all the other google changes and this one seems the most volatile to me personally. My market is health and spirituality. I don’t know if the drastic shifts are in any way exclusive to health websites or spirituality articles but it sure is yo-yo-ville here.
Nice to meet you Neva… Yeah, the changes have been crazy for sure. Overall, its nothing that unexpected… think sites continue to struggle, good content sites continue to do better! :-)
Thanks for the encouraging words Mark. By the way, love your photo.
I checked out your site. It is extremely well-designed. I am a sort of hunt and peck html coder, don’t even know how to do css. So, for my sites to have ranked as long as they have is sort of a miracle already. I think it helps that metaphysics and etheric alchemy and such things are niches within themselves. However, I’ve also been lucky in rankings for holistic health stuff and, as I’m sure you know, that is not a niche but a wide, wide, wide promotion area on the internet. So….can’t complain really, but probably will anyway, ha.
Anyhow, very nice to meet you.
[...] to make sure I clean up after myself when using certain tools, plugins or themes. Ever since the Google MayDay update, I have been on an optimization tear… In the process of cleaning up code to speed up [...]
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