Category Archives: SEO Advertising

Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic

Posted on by poonambhatt

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. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm

Google’s Matt Cutts just posted a video on YouTube answering the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt said Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm. They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches. But overall, he hopes to average at least one change per day to the algorithm. He said in 2009, they probably had between 350 to 400 or so changed to the search algorithm.

A few months ago we covered a Wired story on Google’s algorithm where Udi Manber, Google’s head of search said Google has introduced 550 “improvements” to the search algorithm in the past year alone. So I guess Matt was being conservative with his math?

Here is the video:

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”.  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. It was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which 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.
Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.

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. 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.

Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).

Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals.

What’s a site owner to do? It can be difficult to create compelling content and attract links to these types of pages. My best suggestion to those who have been hit by this is to isolate a set of queries for which the site now is getting less traffic and check out the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities do they have that make them seen as valuable? For instance, how amazon.com has faired during this update, but they’ve done a fairly good job of making individual item pages with duplicated content from manufacturer’s databases unique and compelling by the addition of content like of user reviews.

They have set up a fairly robust internal linking (and anchor text) structure with things like recommended items and lists. And they attract external links with features such as the my favorites widget.

From the discussion at the Google I/O session, this is likely a long-term change so if your site has been impacted by it, you’ll likely want to do some creative thinking around how you can make these types of pages more valuable (which should increase user engagement and conversion as well).

Update on 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” He recommends that a site owner who is impacted evaluate the quality of the site and if the site really is the most relevant match for the impacted queries, what “great content” could be added, determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query.

He notes that the change:

  • has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out).
  • is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites).
  • impacts long tail queries more than other types
  • was fully tested and is not temporary

URLs and SEO: SEO Best Practices for URL Structure

Posted on by poonambhatt

URLs and SEO: Various Strategies for URL File Names: Below are various strategies for URL file naming.

1. Why do we care?

URL is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that affect both SEO and usability.

It affects:

  • Rankings (placing keywords in the file path is one of the most effective ways to make the keywords more prominent);
  • Click-through: a “clear”, “readable” URL can be another reinforcement signal for the user to click it;
  • Usability: a good “obvious” URL helps the user understand what the page is about even before entering the page.

2. Keywords in the file name

There is no doubt that keywords in the URL matter (so far they even matter a lot). However this doesn’t mean that you need to stuff your URLs with only keywords. The best practices would be:

  • Keywords in the file path occur naturally;
  • Keywords in the file path help make the URL easier comprehensible and memorable;
  • URLs do not consist of only keywords: here’s a good point expressed by Onreact in his post on top 10 fatal URL design mistakes:

    Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs in as much as their posting becomes totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy

3. Word separators

While Google has become much smarter when it comes to identifying separate words in the file path, a dash is still considered the best choice:

Word separator Disadvantages Example
Space URL encoded as %20 (makes the URL not easy to read). This may also prevent from sharing the URL in some social bookmarking services. /word1%20word2
& URL encoded as %26 (makes the URL not easy to read). This may also prevent from sharing the URL in some social bookmarking services. /word1%26word2
Comma (,) or period (.) Abused by spammers /word1.word2 OR /word1,word2
Underscore Traditionally it isn’t seen by search engines as a word separator (this is slowly changing now) /word1_word2
Hyphen NONE /word1-word2

4. URL length

While it is still considered the best practice to stick to shorter URLs, the factor is becoming less and less important:

  • Usability: Very few people manually type a URL in the address bar. They either use bookmarks or search history (e.g. FireFox / Chrome smart address bar that shows URLs while you start typing the title of the page) or just use Google to find the page again;
  • SEO: Google can handle very long URLs (though it is still rumored that it prefers short URLs, I personally don’t see any big difference);
  • Click-through: Google now breaks long URL in SERPs smartly: it only shows the parts which use the search term or even substitutes the URL with breadcrumbs.

5. Case sensitivity

We have discussed this before: URLs are case sensitive. That being said, if you have two versions of the URL live and linked to (which is only possible if your site is on Windows server), this means that both lower- and higher-case URL versions return 200 OK status when queried. This will cause some duplicate content issues but Google will most likely be able to figure that out (by choosing one of them). What’s more important is that you are wasting plenty of link juice spreading it between the two versions.

It is recommended to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version) and to use 301 status code to redirect all other (capitalized, upper-case, etc) versions to the lowercase one.

6. URL Extensions

We’ve discussed URL extensions previously and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter too much if an URL have one or not. There are some pros and cons (listed below) but these are rather minor arguments:

Argument for using an extension: intuitive browsing: seeing an .htlm people may understand that is a page with content, seeing / people may assume that’s a folder. Although there is no direct impact on rankings, an URL extension makes it clear both to a user and a search bot whether this is a page or subdirectory.

Arguments against using an extension:

  • Reduce the overall URL length, which is just better overall. Not that the 4/5 characters that are in the .html or .php really add a lot, but sometimes small things can make a difference.
  • No problems with any technology changes (moving to anew CMS, etc): no need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

7. More URL tips:

  • Cool URIs don’t change
  • Don’t put dates in the URL.

Factoring Time into SEO

Posted on by poonambhatt

We all know that it takes time for your rankings in the SERPs to change. Although they do fluctuate frequently, long-term improvements in your SERPs rankings take time to produce.

Some time needs to pass before the Search Engines are confident you deserve increased rankings. Things that can happen during the days, weeks or months before you see some real results include:

  • Increase in aggregate traffic – if more unique visitors are landing on your website, then that means there’s a bigger trend of searchers looking for you, therefore your website is more relevant, so the more traffic you have, the more you’re seen as authoritative
  • Increase in links pointing to external pages linking to you – this has a snowball effect because you receive more link juice from one link linking to you when other websites are linking to the page that’s linking to you.
  • Increase in the amount of clicks from searchers – search engines have a general idea of the percentage of clicks the #1 position for a keyword should get (i.e. the #1 result should be getting 40% of clicks, while #2 should get 20% – arbitrary numbers), so when there’s an imbalance of clicks (if the #2 result starts getting 40% of clicks while the #1 result receives 20%), the results in the SERPs are re-ordered (the #2 result would be bumped up to #1 to see if it can maintain the 40% of clicks it has been receiving)
  • Increase in age of domain – as your domain ages, and you continue to renew your domain for at least a few years until expiration, your website’s authoritativeness increases because it’s an older source of information.
  • Increase in age of backlinks – as the age of the backlinks pointing to you increase, search engines believe that your website is more authoritative because the links serve as past proof that your website is worth checking out. While search engines love fresh content, they also highly respect older content