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

Some intermediate summary on the poll results and analysis of what has been probably tweaked in Google algo:

The poll is giving the following results:
++ 4 reports
+ 4 reports
= 6 reports
- 7 reports
-- 14 reports

So, aggregatiion shows that there are 8 positive reports on sites using SEO promotion techniques, and 21 negative reports on sites using SEO promotion techniques.
Thats may mean only one thing at this stage: Google tries to improve his algorithm by adding some features that decrease the value of common SEO techniques.


Now, the question is what are those some features?
According to multiple reports in this thread, google may have done the following tweaks:

1. Google assigns a specific theme to each website, and a website ranks well only for those keywords that are within this theme.
2. Links to inner pages play important role now. So those websites which have links mostly to their mainpage have dropped.
3. Contextual internal linking becomes very important. The keyword here - 'silo' style interlinking.
4. Long tail keywords go to relevant sites only (not sure about this).
5. Quality of content and regularity of the content update becomes more important.
6. Google does more 'manual' intervention for top brands.
7. Google likes valid w3c pages more. Site load speed finally gets into play also.

Gents, your opinion on this and other observations are very welcome.

George

 

e-commerce store.
url: www.webtogs.co.uk

I am going to share this as perhaps others may be experiencing similar problems and I am currently trying to find patterns to the madness.

Massive, massive drop since mayday and caffeine.

the background:

• organic / semantic SEO structure (have a look yourselves)
• used to have great long and head tails.
• unique content, including best descriptions, features, videos, reviews
• no dodgy links, all manual - added over 2 years and never more than 35 a month
• according to HitWise, best in our sector (outdoor gear) for bounce rate and time spent on site
• recently, winner of USER award for best e-commerce site by Walk magazine (that's the industry's Oscars) - so the argument of not providing a valuable service to users is gone...

the fall out:

• since 5th, there has been nearly 50% drop in traffic, all our product pages stopped appearing in serps (no longtail what-so-ever)
• fluctuation on main landing pages, including cross-linking dead/disabled products that google has dug out of its cache with the landing pages urls (eg, on a search for 'the north face' the corresponding url that we come up under is for a disabled product instead of the landing page with natural 1k+ links and PR2). note: all disabled / discontinued products 301 to parent brand page
• pages seem gone from cache, inc big landing pages like /Berghaus/ (PR2) - which you can see by using cache:http://www.webtogs.co.uk/Berghaus/ - yet if you search for "berghaus", the url appears on the UK SERPs and next to it, the 'cached' link is present and working. bizzare.
• craw rate changes and dropped off like so:

may
-------------
DOM PRD TOTAL
-------------
3   370 3665 (may day update? worldwide datacentres? )
4   729 6176
5   709 7019
6   574 8635
7   429 5062
8   385 3848
9   367 4871
10  333 4404
11  307 5843
12  340 5626
13  378 5168
14  407 2681
15  369 1769
16  416 3389
17  432 1759
18  470 1279
19  355 1778
20  387 1858
21  229 1330
22  298 2802
23  269 2302
24  247 1576
25  222 1516
26  299 1867
27  370 2113
28  84  2418 (mayday update to uk data centres ?)
29  134 1555
30  2   116
31  129 4245

june
-------------
DOM PRD TOTAL
-------------
1   73  3962
2   140 4069
3   150 6564
4   132 4504
5   154 2301 (official caffeine launch across all data centres ?)
6   122 1882
7   94  1697
8   165 2190
9   117 1340
10  217 1285
11  119 1080
12  112 1106
13  111 2685
14  103 1203
15  8   571
16  0   1180

Code (javascript):

this is data that i extracted from the log files. the first number (PRD) are direct hits by google bot for our product pages (which are gone from SERPs), the second number is the total number of visits by googlebot (exclusive of image bot) the day.

instead of visiting product pages through our internal linking structure, we are currently noticing only googlebot visits from GoogleBase (which have urchin campaign= code appended to the urls).

Sitemap reporting 3,878 indexed urls of 5,839 (yet site:webtogs.co.uk reveals more than 10k).

we are now being overtaken on head tail and long tail by companies with NO on-site SEO and urls like product_details.php?id=nn, no h2/3/4 spread, no title= or alt tags, no meta keywords, less links and less content (but conceivably, better content density for particular keywords in terms of less volume of other text, in-spite of how useful it may be for users)

needless to say, i am stumped and lost for words. as somebody wisely said a week ago when problems came about, things will only get worse. they did.

this is what happens when the subjective view of a single company becomes the global factor that determines how you create and tun the web and your business. bring on the bing, or release the new playbook... i have spent way too long building / coding this site to be done by something as silly as a commie update...

 

Dimitar

Thanks for the interesting (but sad) report.
Seems like the grawl rate gets down for many e-commerce sites (and blogs are getting indexed like hell, in opposite). Caffeine' bug, imho.

>>>this is what happens when the subjective view of a single company becomes the global factor that determines how you create and tun the web and your business.

This game is called monopoly. Everyone knows its bad, but everyone is playing the rules, since there are no other options ;-(

In general, looking at you site, I think the traffic will get restored, since there is no clear justification of such a drop.

 

The fact that so many new and rubbish sites float to the top where decent, longstanding sites with good content get dropped off might mean they'll change the algorithm.

What use is a search engine where you look for something and you get 50 inaccurate bloggers comments from yesterday right at the top, and a .gov site with the definitive answer doesn't even rank before page 10 of the results?

 

Some of my keywords ranking in Google dropped from the first page to the second page, and the traffic from Google also drop.

 

Since I have been tracking this for a while... I would say there is no quick fix to this for them. It did work great in some niches (more relevant results). But it others it result in complete garbage results. They'll have to tweak it more.

I have many ranking that haven't changed at all. I.e. a term that is #4 rank still is, but gets half the traffic after the caffeine update. I mean WTF. No global results haven't changed for that term either. Is google's new layout sucking up traffic?


GK, So what have we totally learned from this thread?

 

Dropped a bit. I'm thinking it may be seasonal. It's certainly not due to Google (reportedly) emphasizing content more, because mine is a very content-rich website.

 

One of my 3 years old site's traffic increased quite a lot but my 4 years old site's traffic decreased by the same percentage. Strange!
The thing I noticed is -- while the first site got the traffic for short phrases -- the second but older site mostly gets the Google traffic for long-tails.

 

I have to report that the change in traffic across the board was +0.7235% , is that acurate enough for you?

 

i have given up on the idea of being sat and waiting for it to come back. it does not. instead, i have applied a bunch of changes that will benefit our long tail by including links to all products in the brand landing pages, as well as applying canonical urls to product skews so less items are being actually exposed to the bots.

this seems to have had an effect as products that were NOT in the first 300 results have now started to make an appearance again (albeit, near page 9/10 but still). i am also culling all various user-centric filters for sizes and prices which affect urls and doing them via javascript, which ought to make the site seem like it is duplicating content far less. i will report of any further changes as and when i see them - perhaps things are not as bad as initially thought and our losses can be recouped...

 

Seems like the only winners for long tail keywords are the big sites amazon, ebay etc...

 

for me from page 1 to nowhere on google

 

The thing that I notice now is that it feels like the rankings outside of the dance, are set in stone. Same crappy results. There are some pages that have a total of 12 links and two paragraphs beating my old #1 ranking. My page has well over 2,000 links and is not overly optimized.

I added about 50 new keyword laden articles with inline anchor text and 400-500 links all over the place over the last three months and I haven't seen any new words gain rank over the last three months, since my site was affected by MayDay. I know they said late April early May this happened, but many niches so the same thing happen on March 15.

I just don't get it.

 

Have you analyzed the competitor's interlinking structure. Probably he has 1000 links with proper anchor text from other pages?

I suspect that the most of the article directories and sites are under no-pass-link-juice sandbox in Google. For me articles also do not work, as they did, even ezin.

pjman, you have asked for some summary. I attempted to make an intermediate summary (see the top of this page), later on, I will summarize the findings in more detail. I need more info.

DP members, your input on your MayDay experience is highly appreciated.

And of course, many thanks to all of you who have already given your thoughts and observations in this thread!

 

I saw significant increases the May updates. I actually had a local classified ads website that a few months ago I was starting to worry about because all its traffic (below 250 visitors a day) was drying up that almost instantly doubled its traffic when the MayDay stuff hit.

 

This is interesting. Dropcatchsell, can you describe the site, how was it promoted, content type and structure, backlinks sources? Any specific interesting aspects of the website?

And last question. Is the traffic still the same high, or get back to normal?

Thanks, George

 

increased alot man

 

Hey George I still with you this. Had server trouble this week, that's why I have been silent. MYSQL upgrade grumbles....

I can now confirm contextual internal linking is bigger than before. I haven't seen my ranks on anything really move up for weeks. Even though I'm link building and adding tons of new content. I went back and added some contextual links, maybe 3 per 500 word article, to areas that I did nothing else (no extra link building or new content) and they shot up the ranks pretty well. Up 20 spots into the top 20 on 4 pages. The pages that I was pointing to in the contextual links went up.

 

Google update not only effect our websites traffic also push our websites keywords on last pages from 1st and 2nd .

 

Sounds like a catastrophy, man. What are you planning to do to recover?