It's been two months since Google's latest algorithm update, nicknamed May Day, which affected sites that rely on "long-tail" traffic to bring the majority of visitors to their website. Little was published about the update - at least in comparison to Google’s Caffeine initiative. MarketingVox spoke with Evan Bailyn, SEO expert and founder of First Page Sage, who has been in the trenches with the update since it was released. Bailyn is also writing a book on the update and other SEO techniques.
His take on it:
Sites that have a more diversified pattern of high-quality inbound links will rank better for long-tail searches (e.g. "antique spanish colonial furniture"). "Google is now giving less ranking power to sites that have only links pointing to their home pages, and more ranking power to sites that have a smattering of links to inside pages, such as blog articles. This, of course, is an effort to reward sites that are receiving links naturally rather than paying for them."
It is significant mostly from a link acquisition perspective, as web developers will need to attract links to many different pages rather than just the few most important pages of their site. A good way to do this is by creating a consistent social media linking process for every new article that comes out; that is, linking to all of your new pages from your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts, Bailyn advises.
The sites that are most affected by this update are the ones that rely on traffic from lesser-searched keywords, which includes most websites that have at least a few hundred pages indexed by Google. "If you have a blog, a glossary, or a robust collection of articles on your website, now is the time to start attracting links to those inner pages," he advises. No longer can webmasters rely on PageRank "passing through" from the home page to the inner pages with quite as much ease as before. Google wants to see interest from other sites in many different pages on your site in order to grant top rankings.
Be aware of May Day's intersection with Caffeine - namely in the area of fresh content. "Sites that regularly produce new content (kudos from Caffeine), and receive links on that new content from other sites (kudos from May Day), will be the most successful."
