Google May Day Update

Google May Day Update – still rumbling on…

After watching Matt Cutts talk about the May Day update again (I have watched it 5 times now) I still have a feeling there is more to it, obviously Google and SEO don’t sit easily together even when SEO is applied in a most responsible way so Google will always tinker with the system.

Whilst tinkering is one thing major updates are another, they come in a number of ways that affect SEO with the most significant and life changing having actual names, Florida, Big Daddy, Vince – all are renown for changing the way SEO can be successful or unsuccessful with mass culling of websites that sit on the wrong side of the line.

SEO agencies have to cope with the fact that we do not know where the line is exactly and when an upate comes along we don’t know where the new line is drawn.  The video by Matt says Google release as many as 400 significant updates a year with a number of bombs included, that means 400 modifications that can affect site ranking, little wonder SEO can be difficult.

The latest May Day update is supposed to affect longtail search, that is search results that are based on longer search strings rather than two or three word generic and category searches. The release was around the end of April with some touching up thereafter, given the amount of spider activity at the end of April it is quite possible there was a more significant update than just a tweak and that some generic stuff will be affected.

Google May Day was released to improve relevancy for product search type queries but its unusal for a low significance update to get a name and a video without some slightly wider implications. If you are hit in your product listings then its likely that the path to your pages is too long and remote, try and elevate the tier structure to the deep internal pages then release some new content and a few internal links and it should help.