MAYDAY, MAYDAY

In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.

Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.

But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.

 

This appears to have affected a large number of webmasters with reported traffic drops ranging from a 10% to 90% loss with a very apparent change on how Google is handling long-tail phrases and how far more spammy sites seem to be appearing in some results. This thread on Webmasterworld is long with a lot of analysis and speculation resulting in 13 pages of posts, so I’d suggest going straight to page 13.

This has had a much more noticeable affect and is apparently not finished yet. As Google isn’t too forthcoming Mayday could be a part of Caffeine; however, this shouldn’t necessarily be so because Google stated that Caffeine would be purely an infrastructure change that most users would probably not notice.

One poster, dusky, summarises on May 12th:

“There are too many legitimate white hat sites being whacked to believe it’s a penalty. Many well established gov and edu sites, large commercial and corporate sites, well known news and media sites that seen a change for the worst so far for the last three months at least and starting MayDay in particular. G* sites themselves are affected as noted above and somewhere else, how many more days or weeks this is going to take is probably everyone’s question, at least the people who join my “total re-index” camp anyway, or shall I call it total-recall. We used to think they lost some or most of the data when this happened, and that’s why the crawl rate and the re-indexing, but it turned out it was due to infrastructure and algo updates, Florida and BigDaddy are best examples.”

We have a theory based on TF-IDF. Ian Lavelle, my colleague here at Outrider, took the time to show us how this algorithm change (and apparent surge in spam pages showing in search results) could affect the long-tail. You can read Ian’s post here.

UPDATE

I thought I’d update this post based on the fact that SearchEngineLand has posted a confirmation of the Mayday algorithm change on May 27, 2010 (see excerpt below):

“Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks……

……However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”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.””

Thanks James….

Tags: Google, google algorithm change