A mayday situation is one in which a vessel, aircraft, vehicle, or person is in grave and imminent danger and requires immediate assistance. To many online entities, Google has put their long tail search referrals in imminent danger.
Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times and if you are too narrow in your optimizations you will be at the mercy of each revision, and may find your rankings drop.
Specifically, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may find that there was a drop in the number of referrals, pages getting traffic, etc, due to the “Mayday” change, but any drops in traffic to your big terms are most likely unrelated. Search referrals (long tail traffic) is where you should look for change.
If you monitor your rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms, you may notice that your rankings suddenly dropped and indexation or crawl statistics suddenly changed.
There is much speculation about what elements of the algorithm were tweaked; to many that Google may have reduced the size and depth of the primary index and possibly broad link devaluation, and/or a shift in how phrase match is performed, increased bias may now be given to authority/brand sites, and many other unsubstantiated theories.
In reality, Google has been looking to achieve a few fundamental things with their search engine: Improve speed of results, improve relevance, and increase the amount of time users spend on Google.
Google has also been trying to ensure that brands are being found first for their own goods and products; if you have your keywords and searches better engineered to sell products than the actual manufacturer, you may have seen a drop in results after Google’s tweaking.
Regardless of what elements that Google changed, if you create unique, relevant and comprehensive product descriptions and search terms instead of simply using generic terms, you could save yourself current and future traffic loss. This is a strategy that we advise and implement for our clients at Metamend. Hopefully, your service provider has prepared you accordingly.
Amazingly, a heavy keyword count is not the fix you are looking for; review your link structure and content, make site-wide changes for the benefit of the Googlebot, and give attention to who overtook you in ranking.
Avoid spam and purchased links as a quick fix, and instead focus on what the competition is doing different from you and work on building your page strength.
Does this mean you should forget about Search Engine Optimization? Absolutely not!
In fact, the opposite is true; Search Engine Optimization is more important than ever. Industry professionals can guide you in making quicker and more relevant changes to your site and rebuild or maintain your ranking in a more timely manner.
