May Day, May Day, May Day – Google’s Long Tail Rankings Change

When it comes to long tail queries you want your web site to be of high quality! Google has once again tweaked their algorithm, this time it’s about long tail keywords. Matt Cutts at Google had this to say about this new change: ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.” With this new change sites with lower quality pages are most likely to see a difference.

Sites with many pages without many inbound links have seen the greatest difference with this new “May Day” update. I had an ecommerce site call me this week saying that they had noticed a substantial drop off in their SERP’s, and after doing some groundwork I can only assume that this was definitely a result of the “May Day” update. Being an ecommerce site they fit the profile of those pages not having a lot if any inbound links. The quality of their page design was very poor both in structure and overall seo design. Their product mix is also in a very competitive industry, so that makes their seo structure and strategy that much more important.

So if you are a web site that has been affected by the “May Day” update your goal is to be a “higher quality” web site, and to be that you need to ensure that you have “higher quality” pages.  The way to do this is to visit those pages and go back to SEO basics to get back to where your SERPS’s should be.