WebProNews Ad Rates Click Now!
Read WebProNews
With Friends!

Is This Google Algorithm Update Costing You?

Google Mayday Update Affecting E-Commerce Sites, Long Tail Traffic

Get the WebProNews Newsletter!
By · May 31, 2010 · 137 Comments

High rankings in Google search results are coveted by nearly all webmasters, but Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes. Actually, Google is said to make roughly one change per day.

One recent change in particular, however, has gotten some webmasters riled up. It’s being referred to as "Mayday," and some claim it is costing them money.

Do you think the update has affected your revenue? Comment here.

Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, who spoke on a panel with current Googler Matt Cutts at Google I/O last week, quotes Cutts as saying, "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."

She also says Google told her that it was a rankings change, as opposed to a crawling/indexing change. This, she says, "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."

Vanessa Fox"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," says Fox. "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."

She has more to say about it at Search Engine Land, offering some of her own speculation. One reader accuses the change of delivering "a real blow" to his revenue.

This is not the first we’ve heard about "Mayday". There’s been discussion about it around the SEO community all month, but this is the first we’ve seen it really addressed by Google.

Most savvy webmasters have learned by now that they can’t rely on Google rankings alone to drive traffic. This is why social media opportunities presented by networks like Facebook and Twitter have become so attractive. The way people search and obtain information is becoming more and more diversified, not only spread out around different applications (largely due to increased mobile usage), but also within search engines themselves.

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight). The importance of ranking in a completely natural, organic search has become greatly diluted over time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still nice, but it’s getting harder to rely on as well as less critical for discovery.

Stay tuned to WebProNews for our exclusive interviews with both Cutts and Fox from Google I/O, in which they talk with our own Abby Johnson about a variety of search-related topics. They should be posted soon.

Do you think your rankings have been affected by the "Mayday" update? Let us know.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Google Makes Changes To Local Listings On Android, iOS

Google Makes Changes To Local Listings On Android, iOS

Google has made some adjustments to local search results on Android and iOS devices. Users can now see an experience that more closely resembles that of the desktop experience. "I'll admit it, I...
Google PageRank Applied To Cancer Outcome Prediction

Google PageRank Applied To Cancer Outcome Prediction

While PageRank may still be a huge part of Google's search algorithm, some feel the model is outdated, and are looking for new approaches to web search. That's not stopping scientists from finding in...
Does Microsoft Ignore Bing’s Results?

Does Microsoft Ignore Bing’s Results?

Earlier this week, Google released their annual Transparency Report, which, among other things, focuses on the multitude of search engine result takedown requests they receive. Among the information ...
Top Rated White Papers and Resources
There are 137 Comments. Add Yours.

  1. wherever you look at Google, know- there’s MONEY!

    sometimes it gets sad, but this is e-world, and honestly I am a little afraid of what is going to happen next!

  2. Guest
    Reply

    We’re a small firm and competition is very fierce. Google is making it far too complex for the average Joe to be where he belongs in ranking. We have been around for 15 years online and always have been #1 organic in our area of expertise. Now? We’re ranked 4 or 5. It has had a horrible impact on our sales so much so that we are on the brink of bankruptcy because of a 20% YoY loss in revenue since 2008. I do blame a lot on the changes Google made since over 65% of our web traffic came from Google.

    • Google sent you 65% of your traffic.

      I certainly hope you were on the blogs then talking about that, because you have no right to complain about it now otherwise.

  3. Bob
    Reply

    God damn it Chris. I was one of the first posters on that thread and by God this thing started before May. It is supposed to be MarchDay, not Mayday. In May some users started seeing dropped rankings too and joined the already started in March thread. Hell broke loose in March.

    Yes, G. is playing with fire and it appears they are hell bent on being the next infoseek or Altavista. I’m using Yahoo more and more these days. I’d say to all webmasters affected to change your sigs on all forums you visit to promote Yahoo or Bing. G. is way too big. Never believed in gov. regulation but I’m scratching my head on this one. G. needs to be broken up. G. is abusing their power.

    • Martin
      Reply

      You have it right. Google should be broken up before it does any more damage.

  4. Hello.

    I am new to all this stuff ( almost 1 year in trying to promote my website http://www.driverwithvan.com
    I would say, google has made some changes and now my website wont show up in certain web queries where as befor it was on page one.

    :(

    What the latest technique. should i make doorway pages? would i be penalized for that by google?

    awaiting response.

  5. ..but I believe that in 1-2 weeks things will be better :)

  7. Bob, I have to agree with you on the timing of this thing. This came about on March 15th for us. We have seen a 66% drop in google referrals. We have been around for over a decade, never play any tricks, have tons of content. Yet we still got hit with the Big G drought.

  8. Guest
    Reply

    I have absolutely no doubt that Google has been doing this at an accelerated rate for years now, they are the 800 Pound Gorilla at the moment however they will go the way of AltaVista. This is a purposeful attempt to force businesses to pay for click or die a slow commercial death, it’s pure GREED on Goggles behalf so they will continue to do so and surprise, surprise, surprise EBay and it’s related sites do better in the search results. “It’s all about the money and all you need to do is FOLLOW THE MONEY as they say to find the truth”

    They have no idea how frustrated even there search users are and Bing will give them the smack against the head they so richly deserve and the like Google, Bing will do the same thing when they have the chance…..

    Personally from what I am seeing Google is more of a “Spy Bot” than a search engine, one can only imagine who they are collecting the information for….!!!

    I wonder when it will become Googles turn to be too BIG to Fail, what will happen then and how much of tax payers money will that cost us..!!!

  9. I didn’t know anything about this until I got the edition of WebProNews and checked my rankings. Under ‘marketing services’ I used to be 2nd or 3rd on Page 1. Not bad! Now I am nowhere to be seen. My site has been online since 2001 and apparently Google likes old sites so I have not changed my site for this reason as I didn’t want to lose my rankings built up over so many years, and start again. I used a ‘where do I rank for a specific search term’ type site, and it showed me up as ‘not found’. on Bing I’m right there on page 1 in the same place as I used to be on Google. I am also a site designer for small businesses and have been good with SEO, clients being happy with their results but now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do (outside of PPC) to help the sites with their rankings, including my own.

    • Stella
      Reply

      Like the webmaster above, I make my sites SEO friendly, keyword-rich and I add good-quality information. I try and do all I can (without PPC) to get my sites to rank. I recently created another which was indexed and listed on Page 4 of Google and stayed there for all of a week. Then I checked and it has completely disappeared and when I check the value of my site as opposed to some sites in the top 10 for those keywords (via Samourai), my site has far more going for it with SEO optimization. Maybe no where near the backlinks, but after anaylizing the competition, most of their backlinks are irrelevant anyway.
      It’s so frustrating after spending so much time.

  10. We are a small company that offers one to one tuition on website marketing. Years ago our slides could be the same for months now it seems that we are changing them every week. I do not think all these changes are being made to better Googles service but once again are initiated by the need to increase their falling PPC revenue. I say switch to alternative sources now and save yourself the heart ache as experienced by the comapny in your comments section.

  11. Whatever Google does, it is most likely money related.. Its getting harder and harder to understand Google SERP, and for many of us it

  12. It’s time for Google to be broken up.

  13. Guest
    Reply

    Google knows they can change and move things around. The average Joe has no chance and yes it is probably going to get tuff for SME’s. It is best to implement not just online marketing, but offline marketing along with community engagement and interacting in forums regarding such issues.

  14. Our niche in Google Product Search is dominated by Amazon, QVC and EBay there are a few exceptions but for most of our key words you don’t start seeing other etailers until around page 100 or so. This put small etailers out of business.

  15. Rev
    Reply

    While others are whining about sudden plunge in rankings I’m now experiencing the otherwise in one of my niche websites. Organic traffic and search keyphrases on long tail increased by 15% and 10% respectively since March 2010. This is a 5-year old site. Latest tweaks I’ve done on it was three years ago.

  16. Thanks for share this information. This is very useful

  17. Since the release of this thing sales dropped 65% along with ranking, it is plain to see it truly is all about money all you have to do is search a term on google and the results tell it all if you are not spending large amounts of money on PPC you are not going to make the first three pages. What i find strange is the same results show up for several terms with relevancy not meaning much anymore. I do agree it is time for Google to be broken up the line has been crossed when you are controlling the search results for any given term. I am using Yahoo and Bing more everyday, i also removed that google toolbar from my explorer it is my thought that all your search information was collected to help build this system to favor advertisers, not to give fair UN-bias search result.

  18. As you described changes in the algorithm putted my side in the “free fall”. I think in gerneral it is very useful but the textual content is not that unique.
    No idea how to get up again in the rankings.

  19. Google knows they can change and move things around because of there size and dominance in the market place.

  20. Dieter Torjack
    Reply

    Google laid out the rules for good web content rich pages!
    Why are their own rules not good anymore? Looks a lot like try and error to me!
    A lot of hard fighting webmasters suffer over and over again. They have to spend money for SEO, just to fit in.
    The next moment everything changes and we start spending money again to keep up with this constant changes.
    Google is growing too fast, they have way too much power .. not far from being the almighty Internet-God!

  21. wherever you look at Google, know- there’s MONEY! I agreea. Make more money is the name of the game ….

  22. Pat
    Reply

    Small stores like mine cannot compete with big businesses with big money, we are never on page 1 because we cannot spend so much money. I opened an on-line store because I am now retired and thought it would be a side earner, I was wrong, I spent so much money on Seo, directories, time it is just unbelievable, and I can see big competitors, big companies still at the top. So I have now decided that I will use local newspapers and directories, trade magazines,,… to advertise it is cheaper and at least I can modify my home page whenever I want to do so. So here you are I am dropping Google and their rich friends. Hope more people like will do the same so Google starts rotating the listing instead of having the same businesses at the top.
    Here you have it Google I am leaving you, you are f i r e d.

  23. We have noticed a big change in our Google shopping results. We have been completely taken over by eBay and Amazon listings which aren’t even as relevant to the search term. It’s very frustrating.

    • Guest
      Reply

      I agree.

  24. Of course Google is just all about maximising their profits and forcing webmasters to PPC. The quality of most of the sites at the top of their results is really awful, as Google seems to favour more and more the spammy, rubbish sites, that exist purely for Adsense click throughs because these draw more poor Adwords suckers. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that a site with rubbish content that doesn’t really answer your Google query, even though it looked like it did in the serps, is more likely to get the user to click on an Adsense ad. Have been saying this for years but have always been rebuked by those who say that Google is all about creating a great experience for it’s users as per what Cutts preaches daily. Maybe now they’ll wake up and smell the coffee!

    And why do we always have to refer to Twitter and Facebook in every article. These are mostly used by spoiled kids and are never going to send any meanigful customers to any site. Most members of these sites are not active, only a tiny percentage are. Example: I recently added our regular forum members email list to Facebook for the ADHD charity website I run. Wow, out of the 800 addresses, Facebook proudly announced that they had over 500 already on facebook. So off went the invites to our new charity page. So far 2 have responded and that was a month ago!!

    • Totally agree
      Reply

      I’ve always used Google because it produced the best results, however, more and more the top results in organic search are clearly spam.

  25. I am not seeing much change. I see a lot of people commenting about all their rankings dropping, not getting anymore traffic… I am just the opposite. Our sales have skyrocketed! We are getting TWICE as much traffic this month, and sales have more than doubled.
    Mayday? No… Hail Mary!

  26. I Have For Six Months and many Sleepless Nights Going From Zero To Guru in SEO Skills.I Have 53 Blogs and About 5 WordPress WebSites .Just Recently Notice a Drop in my Visitors But a Increase in Rankings On One Of My WebSites.It is Becomming More Difficult To Recieve Organic traffic From Google.The Effect That This Will have On The Industry is Yet To Be seen.But One Thing is For Sure This Effect Will Cause More Internet Marketers To Out Source Their SEO Skills To India and The Phillipines and Ultimitally Effect The US Econnomy.

    I Will Keep a Eye On ALL Of My WebSites and Increase My Article marketing and create More Blogs To Offset the effects Thus far.I Will keep You Informed of The results.My Site http://www.getpaidevery30seconds.com Continues to Flourish and traffic is Increasing Slightly.

  27. I am made to understand by a Google insider that soon, custom writing site may soon be barred from running their ads on Google.

  28. Really it’s a news for me. Thanks for your info.

  29. hi I’m really didn’t understand about this content because I’m very beginner for google algorithm and another…can you help me to more explain to me …but your articles it’s very helpful for me
    thanks

  30. We gave up on Google Adv because of the poor ROI (and it was fierce too), even though we followed their recommendations/ How To’s on categorizing your business website, keyword (cpc), etc. Now our site is 10 years old and we just depend on creating a trusting relationship with our current and future clients. We rely on the organic and aging of our site instead. It seems like Google will always be updating their Algorithm and simply we’re tired of chasing them, and instead let them chase our site for content for their search engine (as well Bing and others).

    I just remember reading a good article a long time ago saying, “just pretend Google doesn’t exist and update your site from time to time and work on your clients, improve your service and the word of mouth is what will help you.”

    Thanks for sharing your story Chris!

    • hey,

      I will try to change do you have suggestions? it seems the only website around google and no choice to catch a good game seo somewhere else

      al3ab

What do you think? Respond.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

WebProNews Videos | Advertise | About Us | Newsletter | Archive | News Feeds | Terms & Conditions | Contact Us

WebProNews is an iEntry Network ® publication - © 1998-2012 All Rights Reserved.