Hi Dave,

great post. Reading between the lines, and on the lines themselves, “build your site as if Google didn’t exist” is part of what you’re saying…”design for people first and develop a compelling experience and the reward will be a higher Google ranking”?

Lar

I’ve not read a lot of SEO posts recently, in fact I’ve lost touch with a lot of what’s going on in the industry. But even without knowing the ins & outs of the update, what you’ve said just rings so, so true. Good work Dave.

@Lar, thanks for stopping by and for the kind words. If anyone knows what I’m trying to get at here, it’s you.

@Rob, Not only that, but I think a lot of webmasters and SEOs have grown accustomed to replying on internal linking and general domain authority. I think this change is shifting away from giving all the power to the big guys who’s internal page content may not be as good as smaller sites with less domain authority but much better individual pages related to the search term.

@Ciaran, out of touch? Come off it! You ARE “Mr. In The Thick Of It”. Too many junkets leaving you behind the curve? ;)

@Kevin, thanks for that. I wouldn’t say ALL sites were “pieces of crap” but I think a lot of big brand sites, newspapers and the likes depended on the domain authority to rank their, sometimes sub standard, content that was hastily put together. I think this will hit the likes of demand media pretty hard and I think Aaron Wall’s almost obsession with this has been listened to. Thankfully.

Great post Dave and the old adage of about not putting all your eggs in one basket is so true.

I did that several years ago and through lazyiness (whilst travelling the World!) I took my eye off said golden goose site and it has never recovered :(

Dave,

I’m not full time SEO and hadn’t heard of the MayDay change. I thought I’d go back and look at our traffic which is mostly from long tail keywords. True to your comments our traffic is up 60% May over April with no real reason except this event.

So I’m happy with the change.

If anything, we’ve witnessed an increase in our client’s traffic– these are big brands as well as small businesses that have unique content. As for ecommerce sites that compete selling commodity products and have semi-duplicate content, I can’t speak to that.

Google stands by their action, they never bend. So what you say is true. Concede to what Google likes, do something about it. Sulking and bitching will never be able to do a thing.

The change on Google algorithm was so sudden but we, online marketer, should always expect change in algorithm anytime. Remember, the only constant thing in this world is CHANGE. Thanks for this very informative post. :) Oh, by the way, I would like to have a copy of that book. Is that for free? :D

Dave – I’ve got one of the said poorly linked… equally bad… thin content many similiar product page ecommerce sites.

The SEO guy who started working with me a couple of months ago wants me to rip down the many duplicated thin product pages and start again with a focused set of about 20 pages with rich unique descriptions on it.

Then he wants me to develop it organically over the years to come with unique and useful product descriptions etc. These were some of the first pieces of advice he gave me, before the May Day update, so now I know he’s on the ball.

Your great post and description has made me as a webmaster realise that I need to cut back the site/plant to its roots and start again. But with a genuine and user focused unique approach, as with everything in life, if its worth having then its not easy to get.
Thanks for the extra push.
John

Hi Dave

Really great post. Your words are truly inspiring. I can just imagine that most of the people reading this post envy your take on building traffic and inlinks. You do make it sound so easy! The gem for me here is your quote “simply build your site as if Google didn’t exist. Then, when you’ve exhausted every possibility of getting traffic to every page on your site that doesn’t require a search engine, focus on Google.”

Tom

One of the best and most useful SEO blog posts I’ve read (and then re-read) for a while. Solid thinking mate – thank you.

Hi Dave,
Nice post. I like for your article, i underline and bold of your write : “Everyone here is complaining about loss of traffic and nobody is gaining traffic, the lost traffic has to be going somewhere“.

This is probably the most level-headed synopsis I’ve seen on the topic. Lots of shrill whining out there. I’ve learned that if you mimic what Google does on their own property in terms of trying to provide your visitors with top quality links and content, you survive these shifts. Not always, but most of the time. I survived Mayday.

John

@Kieran, fantastic post and analysis. You really put it better than I did. I’d normally spend weeks on a post to create something like yours but put this together in about an hour out of shock and astonishment at the supposed “GURUs” over on WMW. Even Tedster (the owner) was entertaining some pretty ridiculous theories which I found was very out of character considering his experience.

@Richard, thanks very much and thanks for the mention. I’m surprised this post got the attention that it did as it was more of a rant. In fact, I was expecting a slew of “you have no idea what your talking about”s. You’re post is excellent too, many thanks for the mention, especially the context of the sentence ;)

@highpowerled, your site and inner pages are a PERFECT example of pages that Google has “targeted” with this update. With your permission, I might update this post with you’re site as an example:

Look at this: http://www.effled.com/135w-high-power-smd-p-304.html

No original content and no backlinks. WHY should that page rank for ANY terms at all? You’ve been relying too much on your domain authority and internal linking. Think of every page as it’s own site and treat it (SEO wise) as such. It really is that simple. Somebody else is doing this and has a very big smile on their face with all the extra traffic they are getting as a result of all their initial hard work.

Really Nice Post Dave….. I am also facing the same problem that with the passage of time, the site traffic has been decreased and it is still on shorter site.

I kinda take this as good news, for years I have been treating all of my pages as independant entities and have wondered why the crappy sites would rank over me. Now its time for some payback. Just getting back into internet marketing in May, this Mayday Update which I only heard a little about (as I was just re-entering the Fray),sounds to be my cup of tea.

Darn good post, Love the matter of factish type of attitude too, works great when the right mind wields it.

Thanks Lisa. Very much appreciated and thanks for the mention. Your post is an excellent roundup of what’s happening.

Great post – thanks! Just two more data points to support the hypothesis:

A PPC customer of ours with 100’s of near-duplicate pages dropped sales through organic searches by 20% last two months. He now likes us even more :)

A small SEO experiment we are toying with jumped to pages 1-3 from pages 2-6 on brand-related keywords almost overnight. Site is tiny with backlinks to homepage only

You’re right, it didn’t. Not necessarily because of the additional (useful) content on the product pages but because the majority of amazon product pages have at least one external link to them. Food for thought.

Outstanding point Dave, and some key takeaways.

Completely with you on losing duplication and ensure each page stands up on its own..

Great stuff.

Leslie, sorry for the delay responding to this. There is advice I give on the AdWords forum almost every day:

“Take away all ads and affiliate links from your page. Would you still pay for traffic to that page?”. If the answer is no, then AdWords doesn’t want your business.

This holds kind of true with the organic results (although I know this doesn’t address your first point).

You’re spot on, Google really is the only game in town, especially in Ireland. You have to commend them though for shooting across the bow of DMs business model. It’s polluting the web and I think Google have just leveled the playing field. A reversal of sorts of the “Brand update”.

As for the June 3rd incident, over on WMW, there was a thread about it too. An almost “second round” of organic slaps. Playing the domain authority game is still important, it’s just that individual pages, deep links and link bait are back in fashion. ;)

Finally, funny you should mention “Look to what you have done in the past that was successful and do it again” – This is exactly what Google is doing. :)

Thanks Gab and you’re right. Each project WILL require more work. But you were building those deep links already ;)

Easier now for those who work harder (or those with deeper pockets).

I would like to see some specific evidence regarding any change in how deep links are impacted by MayDay. My site has mostly deep organic links, to inventory pages, from authority sites.. in fact I hadn’t tried to build links to my main domains very much. In fact my deep-link structure is one of the main differences between my site and its competitors.

Yet my site was hit very hard by Mayday – most of my google traffic is gone. I’m concluding the opposite about links – it seems like my links were perhaps too diluted, and I’m trying to now build links to parent pages instead of leaf/inventory pages.

I also offered unique content and functionality, but it was mostly autogenerated statistical analysis of the marketplace, alerts, etc.

Competitor pages which still rank well were those filled with tons o ‘unique content’ ie cranked out useless descriptive text.

I feel that adding lots of text will degrade my users’ experience, but it seems like one thing I must now try to comply with google’s quirky notions of ‘quality’.

So I’d love to hear more specifics on how links are supposedly weighted differently by Mayday — so far I’ve only seen vague and subjective comments on this.

Hi Quzzical, thanks for the thoughtful comment. While I agree with you that there is no specific data to back what I’m saying up, this post is merely an observation. I didn’t claim nor do I believe that it is ONLY linking that causing this. As Searchbrat pointed our above, this coincided with the mass rollout of caffeine so there’s a lot more data for Google to play with.

When you say “inventory pages”, is yours an eCommerce site or an affiliate site? What does OSE say about your strongest pages (and compared to those ranking above you?)

You say “Competitor pages which still rank well were those filled with tons o ‘unique content’ ie cranked out useless descriptive text.”, doesn’t that tell you something? Webmasters who believe that building for the user is all that’s needed are deluding themselves. You HAVE to equally weigh up what search engines want too. There’s a fine balance. Bad user experience and high rankings or no rankings and good user experience. There HAS TO BE a middle ground.

I completely agree with you, Google’s notion of “quality” is VERY skewed. If you have any experience with AdWords, you would have known this a LONG time ago.

As I said, I don’t have specifics or more detail, it’s merely an observation. All our sites that had lots of original content and lots of links to the root AND subpages did very VERY well. I’m planning a post with AWR visibility reports annotated to show not only ranking increases after MayDay but traffic increases too. We annotate EVERYTHING so it;s fairly obvious what the cause was as apposed to an external, unrelated factor.

I’ve not seen any confirmation for the notion that caffeine somehow enabled the mayday changes. Caffeine and mayday were orthogonal changes, with the former impacting only speed of indexing.

I believe we just need to go “back to basics” when it comes to on-site optimization: ensure keyword relevance, enough & relevant text content, relevant page titles and good backlink structure.

Sometimes we become so occupied with one important thing, we forget to pay attention to the basic, yet equally important thing.

Hi Dave,

It’s nice I found this post. 2 things that I’ll be keeping in mind from now on for sure. “treat each page like it’s own entity”, I am guilty of relying too much on internal linking than building links to each page. Also, “make your blog as if Google does not exist”

I appreciate the fact that the new update makes it small businesses more viable in the search results as long as the content is relevant and of high quality. Kind of evens out the playing field by a lot and gives them a chance to compete with the Big Boys.

One of the best and most useful SEO blog posts I’ve read (and then re-read) for a while. Solid thinking mate – thank you.