Google "Mayday" update – the death of long tail traffic?
Will the most recent Google update kill long tail traffic?
At the end of April/start of May, many webmasters noticed a change in traffic from Google to their sites. Many people posting on the Webmaster World forum saw that they had large drops in long tail traffic (traffic from keyword phrases of 3 or more words). On the 3rd of May Search Engine Roundtable posted an article entitled Google MAYDAY Update Hitting Long Tail Ranking? that summarised the discussions.
During the questions and answers section of a panel at Google I/O, Google’s developer event, Vanessa Fox took the opportunity to ask Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, what was happening. Matt said that “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”. Google also told Vanessa that this had been a change to rankings and not a change in crawling or indexing.
Is long tail search, then, dead? In my opinion, not really. The key here is quality. According to Vanessa Fox (and the general buzz around the industry), the update mainly seems to be affecting pages that are deep within the navigation of sites and that don’t have high numbers of inbound links. These also tend to be pages that are not given much attention in terms of content and optimisation. So the answer probably is (as is often the case), that if you want a page to rank, you have to invest some time in content optimisation and promotion.
Tags: Google, long tail, mayday, search, search engine updates, SEO