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Last week  Matt Cutts confirmed during Q&A, that the new “Mayday” update is in fact ”An algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It (the update) went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

Google also confirmed that this was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before.

Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.

WebmasterWorld summarized what many webmasters are seeing particularly over the past few days with their Google search results. “Webmasters from very clean, very large websites report dramatic drops in long tail search traffic. MAYDAY seems to be the appropriate shout-out for those affected.”

Yes, most of these complaints come over webmasters seeing a huge drop in traffic from Google over “long tail keywords.”  Long tail keywords are  phrases that are 3 or more keywords long, sometimes also called “fat belly” keywords.

One person said he had a “traffic dropped 50% in a few days, 100,000′s of long tail k/w.” Another person “recovered until this Mid April, when it started seeing some recovery, then bang now 90% of its traffic, mostly long tail disappeared.”

This change seems to have effected only very large sites with “item” pages (ecommerce pages) that do not have a lot of incoming links to support them, are several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them.

For example, ecommerce type sites often have this type of structure. As a result,  these individual product pages are less likely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database.

Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).

If you’re site’s been smacked with this new algorithm and your traffic is down to your internal pages, Matt Cuts suggests that site owners who are impacted re-evaluate the quality of their sites and if these sites truly are the most relevant match for the impacted queries,  determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query.  (I.E. Beef up the content on those pages that are effected….)

Mat also notes that the change:

• has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out).
• is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites).
• impacts long tail queries more than other types
• was fully tested and is not temporary

If you’ve been tracking your long tail keywords with Master Site Manager.com, look at the tracking chart for any of your keywords to see if there was a decline in your rankings from April 3rd to the 17th in particular.

Also check the charting trend for the last 3o days. Is it up or down? MasterSiteManager.com makes it easy to see if and or how badly this new May Day update is effecting your sites and your sales.

We’ll have another update in a few days with some ideas on what you can do to get your rankings and income back to their previous levels.

But for now, check your keyword trends and see where your keywords are headed. After all, you can’t make an informed decision about what to do next, if you don’t know where you are currently.

Till next time,

Don Schnure