A lot has been said about the Google “Mayday” Algorithm change that has the SEO world buzzing.   Mind you Google makes at least one change every day to its algorithm, but this one appears to have had some significant impacts. As confirmed by Matt Cutts, the algorithm seems to affect the ranking in the “long tail search terms” as more emphasis apparently is being put on bringing up “quality” pages. He has stated that he has heard from webmasters who noticed a change in traffic from long tail search terms. He also stated that this change appears to be permanent and Google believes that this change improves the quality of search results.

According to several sources, large ecommerce websites may be impacted the most as perhaps product pages that only have only an image and a title may get not ranked. In perusing some forums, some webmasters are claiming a 50% drop in traffic.

I have noticed a drop in traffic in May on some of my larger websites, but nothing significant.  In fact I went through and did an audit of a couple large ecommerce websites. 

I found that most of the pages I checked ranked for the product name that it was selling, and generally in the top 3 or 4. It appears that every product page that had a descriptive title tag, and some content was ranking just fine in the product name.   But I did see some terms that did not rank.

I think it is appropriate to speculate on what Matt Cutts meant by “quality pages”. From earlier definitions, quality would mean:

·         Good relevant content

·         Quality inbound links

It would be very impractical to have a large ecommerce site that had every page with an inbound link.  Creating unique quality content on every single page would also be very impractical. 

So what is should you do if have a large website that just dropped a huge chunk of traffic?

Here are my thoughts, and they are thoughts only as it is way too early to verify any solution:

Since higher quality pages are the goal of the algorithm change, then I would review the “quality pages” of your existing website. These are the pages that have significant content and deep linking, and perhaps have a page rank that is higher than most of your other pages. These are the pages that should stand to gain from this algorithm change.  My question is: can we do more to exploit the quality of these pages?  Maybe I can’t work on 50,000 pages, but maybe I can focus more on the 20 to 50 or so high quality pages in my ecommerce site. These might be the “main category pages”.   One might want to do more with the content on these pages – expand the scope, add more engaging content, maybe a video, and perhaps the next press release I do would include links to these pages.

 

Will doing that totally make up for your loss? Probably not-- but I do know this: Google makes the rules, like or not we need to follow.   Adding engaging, useful, entertaining, authoritative content to our sites is what Google wants, so that is what we should be doing.