MayDay: has your traffic from G. dropped or increased after the last Google updates?

Rep+ added.

I think Google will tune his new algo to remove the crap in a few months. Thats what they were doing with all previous changes.
So all good sites will get to normal.

Yeap, backlinks will still be a major indicator for Google. But it ends once they find out another way to assess trustworthiness of websites. They move to it now. Look at their recent development: site speed, statistics tracking tools (bounce rate, average time on site), customized visitor's search pages, vote for the site feature, etc.

 

My biggest site took a huge hit to traffic, maybe 70% down - most of its incoming from google are long tail links to a sub-part of the site. I still get single keyword searches into there but not the long ones that were the staple for years. Basically that sub-part of the site is very hard to find in google now. Rest of the site is unchanged.

Conversely, one of my other sites (which has extremely similar style of content to the bit that dropped off my other site - its a spinoff site) with the same keywords but is a much much larger whole site devoted to the topic not a sub-part has picked up quite a bit, and is now consistently on page 2 of google. After the crap ... *mumble*

 

I agree with you and in 70% of the cases in this true. However it is not always the case. For example Google manually puts websites of famous magazines on top, although the data is not relevant in most cases. When looking for a concert of star x, I do not want to find a column of a magazine, but I am looking for concert days. When looking for reviews about car x, I do not want to find the brand website, but real reviews. So yes I can then filter based on date, select forums or blog and do other things to filter. But I really think that this will damage Google's reputation in the long term. Not a major damage, but a decrease in market share of 1% or 2%. We have already seen this happen in the last year.

 

drop a bit but not significantly

 

How far was the dropped sub-part' topic from the main website topic?

Maybe Google started classifying sites to specific themes, and consequently all the relevant-for-theme queries go up, and all irrelevant-for-theme (google thinks) drop to nowhere?

 

I'm also starting to think that not only does google tag your site with a theme, but it will only give weight to inbound links that match that theme.

 

Well, on my gaming blog, it has raised loads, i'm already at 200 for this month so far, usually its 300 for the whole month. This blog is PR1

As for my autoblog, potting-plants.com its risen by alot, just for the domain name, potting plants i've got 120 This blog has no pr

 

I forgot another one. Not only do in bound links need to match your theme, but your better hope to god your outbound links relate to your theme. I think bad outbound links are really affecting pages now too. I wrote a blog entry about how car insurance rates suck for people of my niche. Prior to Mayday, it was ranking on the first page for about 5 terms. MayDay hit and it was crushed. On a hunch I removed the outbound links to GEICO and such and bam, I'm back up after 3 weeks. Another way for them to block paid links.

 

Thats a new observation for me. I have never noticed any penalties on irrelevant OBL. Seems like I need to check all my pages with sold links with respect to drop/rise in SERP for related keywords.

 

Not just now, it was pretty much always the case!

 

Since the caffeine update, my traffic has increased,

 

Like every other section of the site, one level down ... domain.com/dictionary/letter/word. My non-dropped is dictionarydomain.com/letter/word. But it has *only* been dropped for *long* searches ... "words that start with ..." and if you google for those now you just get sites like answers.com or answers.wiki.com or yahoo answers with crappy reponses on, where those pages used to rank below mine not above.

Possibly worth noting is my dictionary that has gained traffic has a question-and-answer section and the dropped one doesn't.

 

My traffic increased. They say the website's speed also count a bit.

 

Well I don't know but I have something different then other webmasters, I found my traffic almost double from Google and it increasingly every day! I have better rankings now compare to 3 weeks! So me it's a good update for my blog.

 

Could you describe your linking approach, content and structure of your blog? Any specific things you have on your blog that might influence this amazing result, in your opinion?

 

One more commonality I'm finding with sites that shot up in ranks after MAyday has been 100% compliant CSS and HTML validation. Now I know this is a big myth in SEO, but I believe it relates to the site speed factor. I think google looks for efficient code now, not so much that you use less bandwidth than your competitor. They just want to know that you took the time to make it efficient for speed.

 

its google tactic to threaten people that google is the king and you cant exist without it

 

Mine has increased a lot, I am getting more visitors then earlier. My sites are ranking higher then they were in some keywords. I think I am benefited with the update.

 

pjman, why would Google care that much about this validation? Correctly validated pages do not directly improve site speed, they do not increase the site repersentation quality, since all browsers are smart to fix bugs themselves nowadays.

Actually, I have a low opinion on the code of my major site with respect to w3c, but this site gained quite a traffic last months.

 

Massively decreased. I seriously doubt they will stay alive for long using that algorithm. Search results are full of spam and are irrelevant. Users will go someplace else.

For those trying to figure out whether is your site or not, it's not your site, it is Google! Quit screwing up with your site! Google is not a search engine anymore but a "news" type (fresh content) engine.