April 28th 2010, Google threw another update into play. While Google has its share of fun, webmasters around the world are still scratching their heads over what the heck went wrong. Matt Cutts confirmed this to be like any other 350 to 500 updates that Google introduces every year in its algorithm.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM]
So what exactly is Google upto? Is it an attempt to reshuffle web? Or is it that Google Engineers were busy coding PacMan and lost control of their core ranking system? For some E-commerce websites which held strong top spots for long, this update has been a massive blow as their sales have gone down upto 50%. Usually these changes and turbulences in traffic referrals from Google are a signal that an algo upgrade or indexing update is on, but the fact that Matt Cutts clearly states in above video that these changes are PERMANENT and would NOT be ROLLED BACK, is the cause of biggest worry for webmasters. To follow the effect of Google MayDay update, you could follow this, this and this thread on Webmasterworld.
How Did Google Mayday Update Effect Search Engine Performance Of Websites
Between April 28th and May 3rd, a number of websites found a sudden drop in their search engine referral traffic, especially the share coming from Long Tailed Keywords. Some webmasters also reported that their websites continued to receive 10x more hits from Google Bot and the activity of Google Crawl increased manifold on websites with more deep crawls. It seems like caffeine roll out went full blow and it started re-indexing and re-grading the webpages.
When it came to Search Engine Traffic — the traffic trend seemed to waiver in following fashion:-
- For some webmasters, ranking stayed the same but traffic went down – This came up due to following factors:-
- Google Suggest feature went berserk (still is), now Google is giving suggestions for all long tailed keywords and from “did you mean: “ to “we think you are looking for” shift is in offing. In an attempt to serve more accurate and user friendly searches,Google is referring traffic to other search terms for which webmasters did not choose to optimize their websites.
- Google map citation went off – Oh yea! this is one of the most important factors which hit the websites, the map citation went off, on an average a google map results, rake in 30% traffic on local search terms.
- More weightage to brands? Try searching for the keyword “Hard Hats”. Now Google has started serving Brand results on the top. They look pretty much mute with minimum content on it, but this for sure is going to cut down the traffic that reseller e-commerce sites were raking in.
- For some webmasters, the rankings also went down and hence resulted in a drop of traffic. This change in rankings was because of the change in the way Google is now weighing the backlinks. Google Caffeine has started weighing the backlinks to a particular website a lot differently
What Does Google MayDay Update Signal About Backlink Weightage?
After looking at the Search Engine Index and Stats of our own Link Building campaigns, we would agree that Google is now devaluing the following cadre of link:-
- Sidebar Links.
- Footer Links.
- Temporal Links.
- High OBL page links.
Looking at individual webpage level, wepages which had backlink profile about and above 30% dependent on above link types saw a rapid fall in Search Engine rankings. The in-content links now are definitely getting more value and power when compared to such isolated backlink types. Webmasters who were using link building services which rely on building contextual links reported that their pages did not see any massive shift in SERP placements.
What Google Is Signalling To Webmasters and SEOs
Many call such Google updates as very non-responsible but in our opinion that these intermediary shifts are introduced by Google to signal webmasters what they need to do in future if they want to continue ranking well on SERPs.
- The new interface; probably we lost some visitors due to the bigger number of links, images and ads available.
- The new caffeine infrastructure and its consequences
- Websites are full re-spidered and re-ranked thus trust is re-evaluated.
- synonyms are introduced and mixed with exact-match searches.
- “uniqueness” of the content gains value so big news sites with agency content or shops with dealer copy (and thus the scrapping websites) received a hard hit.
I am ready to bet $$$ to doughnuts that while some SEOs and Webmasters around the world are busy ranting and discussing whats wrong with Google’s results, there are also certain sect of smart webmasters who are quick to adapt search engine updates and start playing in line to the latest Google updates. Websites which have benefited from Google Mayday Update are those which have their homepages pulling out fresh data from their blogs/news section. You can see the regular snippets of such websites being broadcasted on Page #1 of Google for relevant Keywords hence drawing more traffic to these websites. Also, adapting Press Release distribution and Real Time syndication is another smart way of not falling a prey to Google Mayday upda
te.
te.
Stay fresh and stay updated. Switching to syndicate more valuable and relevant industrial content in Google trusted content repositories is the way. Google rankings are extremely fluid in nature and following the latest aldo updates is the only way you can survive the competition on Wild Wild Web.
Tags: Search Engine Updates
RSS Feeds