http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054
Renaud JOLY, May 28th, 2010 at 1:41 am ET:
Matt Cutts confirmed MayDay update during Google Search Conference wednesday in Paris. According to Matt, Mayday update is due to Google quality search team, not Matt Cutts' team.
Jeff Swanson, May 28th, 2010 at 10:52 am ET:
This is pure speculation, but does anyone suspect that part of this filtering for relevancy was based on click-through-rates?
Google recently added CTR's to Webmaster Tools, which indicates to me that they think it's important for one reason or another. Perhaps, they are trying to tell us indirectly that instead of spamming pages with backlinks, we should worry about whether the users find you site to be relevant by clicking on it as a result. This would make title tags and meta-descr's important, not for keywords, but as an advertisement to have someone click on your link.
Any thoughts on this? If you rank well for a long-tail term, but users never click on your result, I think Google has a problem with that. I realize you can influence CTR with black-hat techniques, but it has to have at least a minor role in my mind.
osovictoria, May 30th, 2010 at 2:53 pm ET:
Oh yes, this change has affected my wittle bitty ecommerce shop on a particular site. As the SEOist says I'll puff up my twitter, facebook, and blogging as a marketing tool to hopefully overcome this minor glitch. Thanks for the info!
The SEOist, May 27th, 2010 at 5:40 pm ET:
Hopefully this will teach some of the newer web marketers that Google is only one of MANY ways to get traffic, and focusing even closer on a single algorithm is only asking for trouble.
A successful SEO plan must encompass all methods of marketing including having a strong social presence (twitter, facebook, squidoo, blogs, etc), reaching out to you readers and even competitors/colleagues, standard SEO techniques (on page factors, articles, etc), down n' dirty link building, and (almost most importantly) strong, remarkable content. All of these methods are ways for people to discover you sans-search engine. And the best part? When people discover you, they talk about you. When people talk about you, you get more links! It's a circle of love.
If you have this SEO plan that hits all the possible venues, you'll never lose 50% of your revenue (as justguy mentioned earlier) simply because one of your marketing plans is no longer working.
Diversity = long-term success.
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