no doubt many of you guys have been affected by last month's Mayday algo change by Google. the question now is have have you done or plan to do to deal with this. so, if you are open to discuss this, want to share some idea with others, please post it here for those who has no idea what this change is, check this out.
Great post/read. Do you think this algo change is to combat smaller mini-sites from ranking for longtail phrases on the homepage vs much larger sites. I can see this leading to even more instances of piggybacking on sites such as ezinearticles, squidoo, and other authority hubpages.
it has done a complete mess of 2 of my sites, linking brand names (not long tail) to product specific pages (long tail) and dropping many listings, utter chaos. no idea if this will be another 'dance' that will sort itself out but i am reluctant to do things at the moment. to give you an example as to the extend of the cock up, 2 serp listings to landing pages that have 1500 in-links each built over 2 years on aged and established domains are being dropped in favour of products that are manufactured by these brands that are even disabled at the moment, have no in-links nor site links and are 301 redirected to the brands. how fucked up is that...
I am not changing anything until the dust has settled. Vanessa Fox has said that Caffeine is still not out so I am sure there are more changes to come.
I heard the changes were supposed to help sites rank better in long keyword searches - which I know google has been having problems with not displaying relevant search results which include several keywords. For an example - I can make a post on my blog, wait a week and then do a search for the exact title of the article. Instead of showing the title of the article, the results were based on stuff like how backlinks the site had, and how old the site was. Older sites that did not have the keywords were showing up in the results. Google was "supposed" to fix it, so that when you did a long tail search, the results were based off the words used in the search, and not the sites reputation.
Even some may be suffered including some of my websites. But I would say this is a good update that help both website owner and regular users at the same time. Most of long tails keyword ever dominated by the big players due to their domain authority, which is not an easy task to archive the status ever. This update will help a smaller websites got better ranking for long tail keywords.
This update is more about relevancy and degraded sites that have been doing unethical link building.. It's a good update for good webmasters.
thanks man~ in my opinion, this change has greater impact on BIGGER product selling sites which have a good bunch of products pages (longtail) which are several clicks away from root and lack of "quality".
feel bad for you man... google's making changes almost everyday and this baby's getting more Intellegent and more human. no doubt i've heard quite some people claiming the death of pure seo
what i've heard is that longtail pages (not sites) can only rank well if they are "high quality".... so if you have a post of longtail, and no body's linking to you, you may not see it on top 10 list...
The changes in the Google also has helped the site I'm working on to rank higher. It suddenly improved in rankings. Regarding on your post. It is great. I've realized a lot and learned more useful websites. Thanks for sharing it.
will the algo change later, i think its faulty as it dropped my serps from the number 4th of the first page to the 5th page.
As far as I know, only enterprise level sites that used to command thousands of long tail traffic have been hit. Had it not been the excellent thread at webmasterworld, i wonder how many webmasters would have spotted it. I'm not affected personally, but i actually see this leading to emergence of more niche, leaner sites as building document level link equity is relatively easier for small sites and there is usually more link juice to flow around in a small thematic site. ninja_va