Google Admits MayDay Search Engine Algorithm Change
By Anna Johnson on June 1st, 2010Did your search engine traffic unexpectedly spike or dip in May 2010? Did some of your webpages climb or drop a few places in the search engine rankings for certain keyword terms? If so, it could have been due to Google’s ‘MayDay’ search engine algorithm change.
At the recent Google I/O developer conference, Google’s Matt Cutts said Google had made a change to its algorithm, aimed at re-ranking webpage results for ‘long tail’ search queries i.e. phrases with four or more keywords.
According to Search Engine Land’s Vanessa Fox, who was on the panel with Cutts when he made this revelation, Matt Cutts explained that the change was a ‘rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change.’
In other words, Google implemented the MayDay algorithm change to re-rank, rather than de-index, webpages based on their relevance to long-tail keyword search queries. As always, Google’s intention was to elevate higher quality webpages. What’s more, according to Matt Cutts, the change is a permanent change to how Google evaluates webpages with regard to long-tail search terms.
So what do you do if you’ve seen a drop in traffic due to the MayDay algorithm change affecting your Google rankings?
The usual advice regarding search engine optimization (SEO) applies: improve the quality of the content on the relevant pages, ensure you have a good internal linking structure in place, and seek backward links from authority sites to those pages. In other words, do all the things you would normally do to boost your search engine rankings!
Source: Vanessa Fox, “Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic,” Search Engine Land
