Mayday Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic

Posted by Christina on Aug 6th, 2010

Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land was on a Q & A panel with Matt Cutts and reports one of Matt's answers as being "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."

The Mayday algorithm change is a ranking change, not a crawling or indexing change. Although websites with lower traffic numbers will still be indexed their page ranking will be lower than before. It appears this change impacts long tail traffic, which comes from longer queries produced by fewer searchers. The long tail can still create a high volume of traffic for a website business and as an SEO I have been paying a lot of attention to this and working hard on creating long tail traffic for my clients and for my own business.

Although reports suggest this change has primarily impacted very large sites, our websites which are small have noticed a considerable impact in traffic coming from Google since May. Our biggest client saw an 18% reduction in revenue. I know some larger websites saw a 50% reduction in revenue, are probably wondering what we are complaining about but 18% is a big hit for a small business. Not to mention the increased hours we have to put in trying to reverse the damage and the hours telling our clients it will all be worth it in the end.

When we are just coming out of a recession, was it really the best time Google to affect legitimate companies revenues?

I completely understand its all about producing quality and fighting the "spammers" but it feels like it's just another thing penalising the small business owner who does not have the revenue's of the larger companies to continuously churn out quality content and build links.

I guess I can now have fun checking out which queries are getting less traffic and which pages that has impacted and get working on improving our websites, content and links.

Its one of those changes that makes a so called "white hat seo" wonder if a nice Technicolor hat would work better.