Google MAYDAY – Algorithm Update Confirmed by Matt Cutts
On May 5, 2010. I have posted about Google SERP Changes May 2010. Today, Matt Cutts have confirmed that there were an algorithm update. Here is a phrase by Matt cutts about this issue:
Google spokesman Matt Cutts said during the company’s recent developer conference 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.”
Read more: Google ‘Mayday’ tweak hurts some Web sites – Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal
Another point of view is that Webmasterworld have a really interesting discussion and they are trying to get a pattern on what is going on and what Google is trying to rank (some new factors may be?):
1st Webmaster Experience
:
Yes I have to the best of my ability. One of the keywords we lost our number 1 spot (after ranking number 1 for 2 consecutive months) – the new number 1 has the keyword as its url, but that’s it, their site is not that well optimized and them as well as the sites below it (until you get to mine – ranked number 5) do not have nearly the amount of back-links and other SEO work as I do.
The other keyword that I dropped down to position 6 for is a more competitive keyword, but again we put a lot of work to get to that number 1 spot and now its seems as if that work does not count anymore. Our back-links dropped from over 7000 to 1500 (according to Yahoo site search). The other websites do load faster than ours, maybe that is my main problem? and most of the sites are older than mine.
The 3rd keyword is the most competitive keyword and we were ranking before major chain companies before MAYDAY, I am not sure why we dropped from 3 to the middle of the third page but that has hurt traffic a decent amount.
Reason According to This webmaster:
- 1. A keyword that is including in the domain is ranking better. But the sites are not well optimized according to the user.
- 2. Not the same quantity links. Less backlinks counting according to Yahoo site search.
- 3. Other sites are older.
- 4. Other sites load faster.
- 5. High competitive keyword dropped.
2nd Webmaster Experience
:
May 4th 3:00pm EST (same day Google interface changed for me) my 5 main keyword phrases dropped from 1st position to 7th, 8th, 9th, 14th and 140th. My longtail traffic was effected as well. What’s weird about the longtail traffic is I’m getting about 20% less now but it’s totally different longtail phrases than before the May 4th changes. Overall traffic is down about 75% and continues to drop.
I have no other signs of receiving a penalty. Still rank for www.example.com, example.com, have 8 sitelinks, have 4 extra links under my main keyword phrase searches.
Googlebot went crazy on my website for a while but seems to have dropped below “normal” now. Google started indexing all kinds of pages I disallowed in my robots.txt but now seems to be correcting that. According to Webmaster tools there are 63 pages I disallowed still in the index out of the 1500 that were indexed.
In my niche it seems like the SERP’s are very old at least 1yr except for 2-3 websites in the top 20. I check specific keywords in this niche several times per day for about 1.5 years now. The websites that are currently ranking in the top 20 with an exception of 2-3 are very similar if not the same as 1 year ago.
The SERPS have not changed much at all since May 4th for the keywords I monitor. It’s as if they are stuck back in time, 1yr ago give or take. This is a highly competitive niche and keywords.
So I’m stuck between a new algorithm, old stale SERPs (waiting for reindex?) and/or I received a penalty of some sort.
Reason According to This webmaster:
1. High activity with Googlebot in his site and then got normal.
2. In the webmaster niche the results are old results (+1 year) but after this change there are 2-3 new websites.
3rd Webmaster Experience:
I have noticed two sets of SERPs for me in the past 2 weeks. 1 set shows up about 80% of the time (and has been up all the time for the last week) and then 2nd set that shows up maybe for 1 day or so every like 5-7 days.
What I have noticed is that when the 2nd set SERP shows up several of my sites disappear from the page 1 for their main keyword(can’t be found past the first 10 pages) while the sites that are on page 2 on the 1st SERP set show up in the top 3 of the on the first page. This is for like 5-6 sites. Then for the few sites that have been around for like 2 years or so they remain stable and are at the same position whether SERP 1 or SERP2. This movement back and forth are to sites that are about 1 or less years up.
It’s funny though that when I see a group of sites reappear on the first page for their main keyword I know that the other set of sites are gone from the front page (and when I do a query for their main keyword of course that is the case).
But over the past 2 weeks the 1st SERP is there most of the time. Just today I’m getting the SERP 2 set. The problem is my traffic evens out since I lose the ones from SERP1, but gain those from SERP2. I wish the 2 sets of SERPs can be one so I can see my whole traffic.
Reasons According to this Webmasters
1. Websites with 1 year or less have been dancing while those sites that are +2 years are stable.
2. It seems that a keyword 1 is at the top keyword 2 dropped and viceversa.
4th Webmaster Experience & Opinion
If I had to guess at a critical change in this algo change right now, I’d guess that backlinks are being scored in a whole new way. I think lots of backlink credit has been wiped out, especially the kind that any webmaster can just dummy up on their own – as opposed to the kind that takes another website thinking your site is worth recommending to their own visitors.
Reason: As he mentioned very well it seems that backlinks are being scored in a whole new way or wiped out some backlinks.
5th Webmaster Experience
My main bread and butter site is the one I’m very careful with links, especially from my own sites. That site has many links from sites that are valued by Google (they have plenty of varied backlinks, largely on my topic, fresh tags, good traffic) yet it lost traffic. That site also has many links from Twitter, FB and others socials.
Other sites that have ROS from my other sites and many lazy links saw an increase on indexed pages and traffic.
Most importantly I’m baffled at the inconsistency of Google results and referrals I get, there’s no way it’s a daily flux thing given the huge discrepancy. If anyone thinks that Caff is here, they are wrong. First Google would have announced it, and second, this [209.85.225.103...] the original caff, is different from any Google.com I have searched on manually. Caff shows on most IP searches via SEO tools but apparently they aren’t getting much play time on Google.com
On Edit: maybe, just maybe Google decided that I got to many links too fast and placed the ‘new’ ones all on hold. That’s the only logical thing I can think of. The link rate was faster than normal but that’s because I got involved with social nets and many links flowed.
Reasons according to webmaster:
- 1. A site that is dedicated with strong backlinks (or authority) is dropped.
- 2. A site with “lazy” backlinks are ranking higher.
- 3. New backlinks are on hold, may be because got many backlinks faster than normal because of social networking.
6th Webmaster Experience
:
Not sure why you or others are not seeing those results more than others but from AZ those results have been in the wild for quite some time now.
Also want to add, I’ve got several very deep sites with a lot of pages and numerous niche focused sites with less than a 100 pages and none of the large sites have been effected and only a few of the newer smaller sites have been hit. Over all, I’ve seen a very large traffic increase since caf has started rolling out over 3 weeks ago.
Reason: Large sites have not affected to him, but smaller ones have been affected.
Bookmark this post as I will update it as soon as there are more webmasters experiences. Please share it with us by commenting here. What is your experience? Following that you know about web analytics.
16 Comments
The more that I look at this the more that it seems that old results are being served. I am checking out a one word, ultra competitive keyword on G.co.uk.
1. Lots of newspaper articles…all old, the most recent being 2009. None with cache..
2. Some really awful bebo type pages.
3. Whole bunch ( 40% ) of hacked and redirected authority sites.
4. Top 10, reasonably consistent with what should be there, but these are aged sites with a strong backlink history over several years.
This would also probably account for the decrease in traffic from some sites reported here. It would seem logical that your rankings would hopefully increase with time, and hence your traffic, but if old results are being served, the rankings would be as they were 3/6/9 months ago.
This could also account for the reports here that recent backlinking seem to have been discounted….
If this is the case ( old results )then sites who have recently obtained the majority of their links would suffer the most, with the older sites seeing less disruption albeit at lower traffic levels, regardless of their recent link building history.
If there is a problem G may be serving the last stable results they had,as they have to serve something.
I am kind of hoping this is the case, or we may have to employ Scooby Doo to figure this one out.
” Stunning recent link devaluation?”
I vote for this one, in my case it’s like a 110% devaluation
Since most average people who use Google are like sheep, the average person is not going to notice anything and in fact a whole lot of average users don’t even know what a sponsored link is. They just click the link on the page that best matches what they looked for. I’ve ran into many people who thought the sponsored links were just regular links and they said they always clicked those first. They had no idea that clicking those was costing somebody money and making money for Google.
There are still many webmasters who live in a fairy tale world that Google really won’t do evil and they just want what’s best for us.
Sure, .edu pages are trusted — but should we expect to see all niches overrun by pages some prof put up in the ’90s? That would be a big change!
This gives credence to the theory that google is discounting (or has yet to calculate) relatively new links.
Things are slowly getting better now. I’m starting to rank well again for old long tail terms I used to before March. I really had lost hope before. Hope this is not temporary.
Due to Google MayDay Update, our site long tail keywords are dropped to various positions, like 3 to 6. Now it changes daily at every position. Our ad-words long tail keywords are also affected. My Question is whether Google made changes to only long tail keywords or else they made also changes to back links on this Mayday.
For high volume keywords. My site was dropped from 1st page to 4th, now its back again on 1st page though position is not same but I am happy with that. I am closely monitoring the positions of long tail keywords for a week or two. Hopefully it wont repeat again.
The quality of backlinks amongst some of the newly ranking sites is disappointing; I realize the attempt is to discount sidebar/footer style links, especially of a more temporal nature, but at the expense of contextual and language relevancy? A few simple filter tweaks and the makeup of the SERPS will vastly improve; I’m sort of expecting them to do it by Memorial Day, but have no way to back up why I think that.
I just wanted to see if there is anyone who has seen a dramatic increase (>200%) in image referrals after the mayday update? we haven’t done any changes to the content of the pages that has the image.
On a side note, we too had a 20-30% decrease in our web search referrals after the mayday update. Almost 80% of our traffic is generated from long tail keywords.
Certainly some interesting changes. A website we rarely worked on just leap-frogged several other authorities in a genre I watch, with little to no work done on it (now position 3, up from 8-10)
Will be interesting to see if this trend continues.
I’ve read a couple of people who have said that their traffic and keyword positions have returned after a drop. Though the amount of time between the drop and return seems to differ from 1 week to over a month.
So a some questions that might help us to understand what might happen in the medium term is:
1. If your traffic and positions have returned how long was the drought?
2. If they have not returned how long ago did they drop?
3. How big was the drop.
4. Does this equate to any situation in the past and when?
My answers are:
1. not returned.
2. 17 May.
3. dropped to third of level before.
4. traffic similar to 12-14 months ago.
Blogroll and footer area links have been more of a playground for paid links than any other areas on the the geographic section of website templates; discounting links from these areas, especially those that shift like the days of #*$! COOP, has been a stated interest of Google. I do not recall which interview and which VP of G stated it, but it was rehashed again fairly recently if anyone cares to dig for it and post a link.
Anyhow, I’m not going to disagree that applying fuzzy logic for weighting on the importance of links from certain sections (especially as the overall % makeup of one’s backlinks) makes sene from a search engineer’s pespective. What I do disagree with is this had the side effect of allowing off-topic and off-language in-text links count for a lot more than they should, in proportion due to weighted discounting of the above mentioned links.
The reason why this might not matter much right now is because the SERPs where I see this occurring the most are still mostly relevant because some large brands I follow are making use of the links from websites written in Russian, about watches, linking to a website like widgets, within the body of text. The casual user sees said brand, thinks it is relevant, and clicks the listing.
This is far from the only change, but is one that is becoming more apparent. Once it gets abused in a mass scale, G will recognize and adapt.
James, Matt Cutts said that they reserve the right to treat them differently and give the links in paragraph more weight. Which makes sense, if they can get it right.
But it also makes sense that one will have many more blogroll /sitewide links than one articles /blog posts written about them. Great site equals many mentions in articles but also many listings under “Useful Sites” type links.
Each quarter we are tracking more and more signals that are purposefully shifting towards large brands. The reality is that this is still manipulatable, but as a chess player are we looking to simply counter moves or to skip a few moves? If you aren’t a brand, you need to become one.
For those that are seeing a traffic decrease but arent sure where there drop is happening on the website here is something that you might find useful. This is more for people that havent been tracking Google rankings.
#1 – Grab the top keywords for May 2009 and May 2010 (make sure the dates match up and you take a long enough sample). You can use Google Analytics or your log files.
#2 – Compare the keywords traffic year-over-year. You’ll probably see some keywords went up and many more went down.
#3 – Identify the biggest changes and then visit the serps for those keywords. Maybe your ranking is down or your indented listing is gone.
For the websites that I have done this with I have noticed some very interesting trends in which keywords are impacted negatively. The more information and research you have the better you’ll be able to respond to this latest change.
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