The latest G
oogle 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 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.
