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Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic May 27, 2010 at 11:02am ET by Vanessa Fox Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic. However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”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.” I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it 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. This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite. 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). My complete speculation is that perhaps the relevance algorithms have been tweaked a bit. Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals. What’s a site owner to do? It can be difficult to create compelling content and attract links to these types of pages. My best suggestion to those who have been hit by this is to isolate a set of queries for which the site now is getting less traffic and check out the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities do they have that make them seen as valuable? For instance, I have no way of knowing how amazon.com has faired during this update, but they’ve done a fairly good job of making individual item pages with duplicated content from manufacturer’s databases unique and compelling by the addition of content like of user reviews. They have set up a fairly robust internal linking (and anchor text) structure with things like recommended items and lists. And they attract external links with features such as the my favorites widget. From the discussion at the Google I/O session, this is likely a long-term change so if your site has been impacted by it, you’ll likely want to do some creative thinking around how you can make these types of pages more valuable (which should increase user engagement and conversion as well). Update on 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” He recommends that a site owner who is impacted evaluate the quality of the site and if the site really is the most relevant match for the impacted queries, what “great content” could be added, 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. He 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

Most article links that appear in Google Discover are sourced from non-Google publishers.

There are not many technical requirements to be featured in Google Discover, compared to Google News. You do not need a specific sitemap for Google Discover, nor is there any sort of manual submission process to make your content eligible for Discover feeds.

less predictable or dependable when compared to Search

how long does a site need to wait for Google to process a quality change and the answer was at least two months - one month won't cut it. And this applies to both Google Search and Google Discover, it isn't different. John said he would guess for a large site a couple of months would give Google a chance to understand it better. A month is too little to see a significant impact.

John then goes into explaining that for a site that produces a lot of new content often, then Google will "focus essentially on the newer content on the main category sections of the web site." Because of the structure of your site, you are giving your newer content more prominence on your web site and Google will focus its crawling and indexing more on that newer content. John said if you are constantly creating new content, then that is where Google will shift its focus on.

if you're looking at an overall quality issue with regards to your website and you have kind of this reference part that's really important for your website but it's really low quality then we will still balance that low quality part with your newer quality news content and try to find some some middle ground there with regards to how we understand the quality of your website overall.

What are Google Sitelinks? Google Sitelinks are displayed in Google search results and are meant to help users navigate your website. Google systems analyze the link structure of your website to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information. Sitelinks are completely automated by Google’s algorithm. In short, Google Sitelinks are shortcuts to your main pages from the search result pages. When do Google Sitelinks show? Google only shows Sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your website doesn’t allow Google spider to find good Sitelinks, or they don’t think the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, they won’t show them. Although there are no certain answers to this question from Google, the following factors seem to influence whether Google displays Sitelinks or not: Your site must have a stable no.1 ranking for the search query. So Sitelinks show up most often for searches on brand names. Your site must be old enough. It seems that websites under 2 years old don’t get Sitelinks The number of searches - it seems that the search keywords aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks The number of clicks - it seems that your site has to get many clicks for the searched keywords It seems that Sitelinks don’t show to search queries consisting of two or more keywords The number of links - links are important everywhere in the SEO world, aren’t they? The inbound links with the relevant anchor text seems to influence the chance of getting Sitelinks How can we get Sitelinks for our website? If you can meet the above mentioned criteria, you’ll have a big chance to get Sitelinks shown for your site. But you can also improve the structure of your website to increase the possibility and quality of your Sitelinks. Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks, so make sure all your important links are on the homepage. The links should be text links or image links with an IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Also, it seems that Google likes links that appear at the top of a webpage. So try to put your important links at the top of the HTML code and then re-position using CSS. Overall, build your website following SEO best practices and rank no.1 for your most important keywords will ensure the Sitelinks appearances and help users to navigate your website.

The future of SEO isn't about beating another page based on content length, social metrics, keyword usage, or your number of backlinks. Better organic search visibility will come from beating your competitors with a higher than expected click-through rate.

In “Google Organic Click-Through Rates” on Moz, Philip Petrescu shared the following CTR data:

The Larry RankBrain Risk Detection Algorithm. Just download all of your query data from Webmaster Tools and plot CTR vs. Average Position for the queries you rank for organically, like this:

Google has finished rolling out the Google December 2020 Core Update on December 16th. It began rolling at around 1pm ET on December 3rd and took 13 days to fully roll out, which is just about the two-week timeframe Google has given us for the core update rollouts.

This was atypical core update, like any core update is typical, but this roll out felt weird. We saw a huge spike in volatility on December 4th, the day after the update began rolling out. And then we saw nothing for days, that was until December 10th when I said we saw the second wave of the update.

While Twitter may need Google to continue offering archive search, Google also potentially needs Twitter in another way. Google may have lost some of the data it has recently been using to bring social signals into its results, as covered more below: Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like” I’ve not yet been able to check on whether Google Social Search and other parts of Google have been impacted by the deal’s end. I’ll look at that later — I’m heading off to enjoy the 4th Of July myself now. Update: Google has sent us a statement addressing the issue above: While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google. As for other features such as social search, they will continue to exist, though without Twitter data from the special feed. You can certainly understand why Google+ has become even more important to the service now. While Google has gotten by largely without social signals from Facebook, having its own data from Google+ gives it insulation if it now has to get by without Twitter signals, as well.

Google MUM, or Multitask Unified Model, is the latest algorithmic successor for the search engine giant. Google has called MUM “a new AI milestone inside of Google search.

It basically gathers subcategories for the query and delivers a more holistic picture for the benefit of the end user. MUM is particularly attuned to comparisons for an umbrella of related queries.

One thing that’s interesting about MUM is that it understands things across text and images. In the future, Google expects to be able to incorporate audio and video in the omnichannel mix, too.

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Make sure it’s mobile-friendly

How much is the top spot on Google actually worth?  According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise. In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.  The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together. “Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby.  “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.” The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1.  Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic.  However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.  As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position. Google Result Impressions Percentage 1 2,834,806 34.35% 2 1,399,502 16.96% 3 942,706 11.42% 4 638,106 7.73% 5 510,721 6.19% 6 416,887 5.05% 7 331,500 4.02% 8 286,118 3.47% 9 235,197 2.85% 10 223,320 2.71% 11 91,978 1.11% 12 69,778 0.85% 13 57,952 0.70% 14 46,822 0.57% 15 39,635 0.48% 16 32,168 0.39% 17 26,933 0.33% 18 23,131 0.28% 19 22,027 0.27% 20 23,953 0.29% Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.

At our SMX Advanced conference earlier this month, the head of Google’s spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, explained that the Panda filter isn’t running all the time. Right now, it’s too much computing power to be running this particular analysis of pages. Instead, Google runs the filter periodically to calculate the values it needs. Each new run so far has also coincided with changes to the filter, some big, some small, that Google hopes improves catching poor quality content.  So far, the Panda schedule has been like this: Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011 Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later) Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later) Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later) Recovering From Panda For anyone who was hit by Panda, it’s important to understand that the changes you’ve made won’t have any immediate impact. For instance, if you started making improvements to your site the day after Panda 1.0 happened, none of those would have registered for getting you back into Google’s good graces until the next time Panda scores were assessed — which wasn’t until around April 11. With the latest Panda round now live, Google says it’s possible some sites that were hit by past rounds might see improvements, if they themselves have improved.

Soovle — Scrapes Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Answers.com to generate hundreds of keyword ideas from a seed keyword. Very powerful tool, although the UI could do with some work.Hemingway Editor — Improves the clarity of your writing by highlighting difficult to read sentences, “weak” words, and so forth. A must-have tool for bloggers (I use it myself).

Yandex Metrica — 100% free web analytics software. Includes heat maps, form analytics, session reply, and many other features you typically wouldn’t see in a free tool.

For example, two of my all-time favourite tools are gInfinity (Chrome extension) and Chris Ainsworth’s SERPs extraction bookmarklet.By combining these two free tools, you can extract multiple pages of the SERPs (with meta titles + descriptions) in seconds.