May Day, Roodmas, Walpurgis Night, Beltane...regardless of the name, it's a time for dancing around the maypole, enjoying the bounties of Spring, recalling the battle for worker's rights, and lots of other fun things. But for many a search marketer, May 1st (ish) of this year will be remembered as the day the long tail died (bye-bye Misses High ROI...apologies to Don McLean).
Old-Timey Folks Gettin' Their Maypole On
Okay, okay, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but the search world (including Search Engine Roundtable and Webmaster World) definitely did notice the effects of Google's so-called "May Day Update". Sure, Google makes minor algo tweaks like this all the time, but around April 28th-May 3rd a lot of sites (SEOmoz included) noticed a sudden loss of 5-15% of their normal long tail traffic. Watch this week's video to learn more about what may have happened, and what you should do about it, or continue reading below for a summary.
What happened here? Why did you (or someone you love) lose their precious long tail search referrals? There are a lot of theories out there: Google reduced the size and depth of the primary index to keep Caffeine fast; there was broad link devaluation; there was a shift in how phrase match is performed; increased bias was given to authority/brand sites; etc. Some, all, or none of these may be true, the important thing is DON'T PANIC! If you saw a drop in traffic, you need to figure out why...don't start blindly changing things lest you care to break what may not be broken.
How do you know if you were affected? Well, start by checking your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd; do you see a drop? If so, is the change in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic? A drop in traffic to your big terms isn't likely May Day, but a drop in pages getting search referrals (long tail traffic) could be. If you monitor rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms (which you should do specifically for this reason), did your rankings suddenly plummet? Did your indexation or crawl stats change suddenly (you can use Webmaster Tools, site: searches, etc. to check)? These could indicate you were hit by the update.
What to do? Run! Hide! Grab your anti-zombie defensive shotgun that you keep on-hand at all times in case of a Zombie Apocalypse! Just kidding; that would be bad. First, look at your links and give yourself a quality check: have you been a little shady lately? If so, maybe you should spend some effort getting a few high-quality links to spruce up the place (Spring cleaning, natch). Can you spare a bit of link juice from a strong page to give those weaker, but targeted long tail pages a little boost? It might help. Again, most importantly of all, don't panic...the engines make little changes to the algos all the time. Google made more than 500 changes last year--more than one per day--and 99% of the time you won't even notice. Even if May Day did impact your site, it could change back next week, so take a deep breath and try to relax. Keep practicing high-quality, fundamental SEO and you'll be okay.
Whenever algo changes like this come through (unnoticed or otherwise), the underlying lesson to be learned seems to remain the same - practice good SEO and either A. the effect of these changes on your sites won't be catastrophic or, B. you can easily recover whatever losses you incurred because you have fundamentally sound strategies.
I run 10 websites and for now i haven't notice any change for them. Maybe Google's May Day also depends on the size of the website?
Yes, there are plenty of people who haven't noticed anything. It will be a while before all the date is pulled in and all the nuances of this update are fully plumbed. But the hey, that's what SEOmoz is for! :)
Great advice Rand.
I always cringe a little when these start to spiral out of control. Suddenly everyone is jumping on the bandwagon with a "me too." It becomes very hard to sift through fact and fiction.
What people need to take away from this is that this is one of the reasons you need to track some key metrics, ongoing. Without them, you run blind and fall victim to speculation.
The other key point is time...allowing enough time to pass to be able to compare data better. Do you have enough to look at week over week? Month over month? How about year over year?
The natural tendency is to react, start making changes, but how can you "treat" something you've hardly even diagnosed? Fight the urge, ride it out, at least until you've gained a deeper understanding.
So one of your metrics has shifted greatly, but do you even know whether it is an important shift? Maybe traffic dropped, but if it was garbage traffic to begin with, this may be a good thing. Reminds me of how most reactions to an increase in indexation are met with positive rejoicing...change in indexation is neither good nor bad.
Relative change in indexation to reality or to dexired reality (little to no duplication, nothing indexed that you didn't want indexed, and indexation of the content you actually want indexed) is what matters.
Interesting points here. Re. indexation, the forums are suddenly filled with posts claiming Google has been driopping a lot of their pages from the index. This is especially true of large sites. But I am not convinced we can reliably know, for very large sites at least, whether this is true. The site: search is just not actionable; when it comes to clients with large sites (I have a few clients who are in the multiple millions of pages) I just don't use site: at all. But worse, I am not at all convinced that the indexation counts in Webmaster Tools are at all reliable either, and I wish I knew how to verify.
Rand, can you please build an indexation checkers? One that goes through all the internal links (a la Xenu Link Sleuth) and checks cache: for each of them? Or would that mean violating the TOS by "sending autiomatic queries to Google"? Ouch. :(
Absolutely.
Working mostly with ecommerce sites, you get used to dealing with very large sites and URL bloat. Worked with a content site that launched millions of new content pages quarterly....
At that point, these metrics, like keyword research demand numbers become less about absolutes, and more about the relative changes from month to month, quarter to quarter, and year over year. Or as a red flag when doing major site changes, etc.
I of course am a huge fan of Xenu, hence my (somewhat in jest) post, Blindfolded SEO Audit.
The ironic reality to our industry is that we proably have more data freely available at our fingertips, but sometimes the accuracy may not be as tight as we'd like.
Just saw your response, thanks (& nice blog)
I think Google started messing up its own tools for webmasters after the Florida update. It's a shame. I used to joke about it and half suspect they were doing it, and how I fully believe it. ("Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean Google is not out to get you!)
Rand, since you've gone SaaS, you should definitely remake all those Google tools that are going down the tubes. You've already done and outdone link: -- not take up site: and inanchor:/allinanchor:
PLEASE! There's no one else to do it.
Really nice comment Brian. Thanks to you and Rand this morning, I am realizing that the sun is still shining (albeit above the clouds).
Way to be a voice of reason.
Hey Rand. Don't beat yourself up too bad man. I think that zis WBF was plenty humorous.
Glad to see something about the May Day updates here on the moz.
Haha, glad you commented on this. Rand you are plenty hilarious in person. But yeah, planned funny only works for some people. I can't pull it off either. *sigh* I try in presentations, it just doesn't work.
Off topic but does anybody know who owns https://www.isthereazombieapocalypse.com/?
I feel confident that Scott Willoughby owns https://www.isthereazombieapocalypse.com/. I am not sure if its a test case but look at the backlink profile. Expecially the yahoo answer links. It also a little disconcerting that its valued by one of those lame valuation website to be worth a few thousand dollars. :)
https://valuethewebsite.com/www.isthereazombieapocalypse.com
Great post!
My site saw a 5-7% increase in long tail on the 3rd.
It definitely doesn't match the trend year over year.
Well, that's exacly why I am suspicious of the trend. Think about it!
For any site that moves down N positions in its ranking for a certain keyword (whether longtail or not), there is one or more sites moving up the page for the same keyword, to the total of N positions.
Losses in rankings are reported much more widely than gains.But they must balance each other out. It's not like people have been searching less for long tail keywords, and someone is ranking for them.
Draw your own conclusions! :)
Unless its Google inserting their own products and pages into the results and decreasing clicks on natural results, and that seems to be happening more and more.
I'm sure a lot of product sites are losing traffic to Google's product affiliate links which are more appealing to the eye.
https://www.seobook.com/google-promote-affiliate-product-ads-search-results
I ran some pretty indepth numbers on the stats we track for May 4-11 compared to April 4-11 (month over month). We saw absolutely no statistically significant change up or down at all.
I'll have to do some more research into some of the other domains we run and see where they stand, but for right now, I see no difference.
Good luck to those that felt the pain of May-day.
Us SEOers should band together and make a movie about this, and play it May 1st for the rest of our lives. Hopefully the residuals from this movie will help make up for the loss in income from May Day, although the scars from the event will stay with us forever.
Great information, glad you took the time to cover this in the WBF!
You should have the mozers get you a laugh-track to support you on the WBF videos =)Â
With 40,000 pages, our website was "affected" by Mayday update.
I said affected, but how? Well, we received less traffic from Google starting around the time when Mayday update go live. BUT THE BOTTOM LINE WAS NOT AFFECTED. Our number of conversion raise or stay the same, so the real impact was a conversion rate raise for this segment (SEO).
The goal of websites are not to get traffic, but to convert these visitors. So you really have to measure impact base on your bottom line (conversion, micro-conversion.)
I monitor major longtail competitors indexing as well as my own.
On 2 May (compared to 22 April):
for the 9 sites with over 100k pages, no one gained any indexed pages, but 5 were down by more than 5%
We definitely look to have lost at least 10% long tail traffic - however we have had site speed issues (and who knows how much the new algo makes use of site speed) and are also expecting to see a seasonal dip, so its difficult to make any predictions for exact causes
Digging about for traffic drop reasons, Ive just run across the change to Google local country search. Given what a screw up it appears to be on face value, im surprised I havent run across any talk of it.
My top spot 1,2,3 position for UK keywords are now on page 4,5,6 because they are mixed into the global data. Googles explanation
I think you make a really good point here. As an Australian site we rank really well for "Pages from Australia" but poorly on their global results. As a result, we're done 30% for the month.
Nice WBF rand. You kinda soothed me :)
I haven't seen any loss in traffic on the long tail traffic but i can say that the site vanished to thin air on the main term results 2-3 days ago. When that happens and i see that the amount of results returned that query reduced by big amounts, i'd easily say that google was making an update and everything would be back to normal the next day.
But it's been 2 days so far and i'm getting worried :/ I hope it's still an ongoing process...
Is I may chip in here, what you are experiencing may have nothing to do with the update discussed here. Especially if your site is new and has few backlinks. It's normal for sites with few backlinks to fly up and down the serps, but as links they develop they eventuallu stabilize. I am suggesting this may be the case because in general the people who claim they have experienced the impact of this update report something else (a certain loss in traffic, presumably longtail, without majore variations in their main rankings).
hello all. I'm a bit confused , on may 7-8 my traffic hit the floor. from about 160 a day ( not big to start with), to about 50 a day. Of course sales went from 4-5 thousand a month to now maybe , I hope, 1,500. so my question is, is this panda, penquin (april 24) or the april one that penalized long tail keywords, a staple for savy shoppers.Our site, asapkaraoke.com sells music discs and the "content" is a simple 6-50 line song list. Google cant figure out what the page is about without some help, so we used a combo of , karaoke songs for women, country karaoke songs, country karaoke music and country karaoke music. in the url, page title, product name , meta description and on the page once.I have since deleted all 10,000 keyword fields, all long descriptions of the products, a repeat of the song list, and any non optimized meta descriptions that had been a real mess in days past. any ideas? maybe my page titles/urls? maybe repeating the product name in the meta title and metas?I always work to optimize according to best practice and in the white hat area, so where have I gone wrong?Â
In some areas we got a nice push from the update.
I'm getting much better indexing results, and much more GoogleBot activity resulting in a huge increase in number of pages indexed. If that's happening to a lot of sites, I read it as possibly bad news from an SEO perspective. Pages that previously weren't perhaps "as optimised" may be getting spidered and indexed. For instance, dirty URL's, poor use of H1 etc maybe isn't now as important as it was - Google is spidering more, and where it finds relevant content on page it's delivering that content.
I wouldn't want to bet my hat on it, but it would fit with drops in long tail for big sites that were put together well.
Thanks for a great WBF.
I have noticed a big drop of referral traffic from images.google.com & co.uk and a big changes on Domain Authority both positive and negative for the Domains I manage
Has anyone else seen their Domain Authority drop?
Seems i got benifit from May 1st algos changes.
I found my long tail words had step up.
I got 15% long tail traffic increment from 1st - 14th may, but suddenly it dropped up to 25% from 15th may until today..
What is the chance that keyword position drops for about 20 SERP's down in one day? :)). Really, I don't think that I do something wrong with on page SEO. Any advice?
If you changed nothing on page...it's something off page. My bet would be a link (or links) that was passing juice has either disappeared or been devalued for whatever reason.
We experience a major visit drop on our Belgian site about diseases, psychology, food,... called Gezondweb.be Only 1/3d of the visits remain. Our main keywords remain but it's not just the long tail that looses it's hits.
The site is built up with different folders each containing 4,5,6,... pages handling 1 subject. The main page of each folders has an introduction and automatically links to all sub-pages, but it seems they almost all have disappeared in Google.
We're trying different things: creating one long page instead of all sub-pages, moving up pages so the url shortens, making sure there's no overkill of certain search key words,... But so far don't know if they result into anything positive...
We're already using xml site maps,...
It's not just a 15% drop here, so it's hard to find were to start although we're anylizing (probably over-analyzing) as much as we can...
Great Video, but I have more :) I noticed the change on May 3rd with one client who took a 12% loss in traffic for April vs. May. However, they have moved up on BING and Yahoo! in the last 30 days. We are tweaking site speed and evaluating multiple other areas to see what is going on. There is one thing that still continues to bother me about Google trying to improve their algoritm. On one of the terms, my client lost a #1 spot to a site that was not visually appealing, laid out terrible, doesn't really satisfy the need of the site visitor and has a broken link on the home page. Too bad that stuff like this happens. It's not just because I am partial to my client. It's just the reality of the site that took the spot. Anyway, thanks for sharing the video!
Wow, I'm not so sure the impacted sites are seeing an impact as small as 15%... take a look here https://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=6fcc&t=6fcc.40
The top question, and #5, in the latest google moderator Q&A pipeline - both describe 70% drops in long-tail search hits, and both questions have large numbers of votes.
I don't see how google can not respond or leave things as they are. Who now is getting the long-tail traffic?
I think this is an example of why aspects of google's business practices should be regulated. It would be one thing if there were a healthy, competitive search ecosystem - a change in one engine wouldn't kill businesses.
But with so much of the economy being driven by subjective assessments (enshrined in algorithm) of one monopoly, businesses need transparency and recourse if large traffic drops occur. Google's secrecy costs businesses untold amounts - they wont tell you if you've been penalized because they don't have to. Microsoft does - it has to, to compete...
Crazy for me Rand - Bingo.com got send down from page 1 to Page 4.
WTF is going on? Another brand update?
I'll see you Monday at SMX and see what you think.
My theory on ANY update is wait 72 hours and that's paid off but it various ways. I do a bit of damage on longtail ans subdomains and geotargeting - wanna share a bit of info?
I hope to give you a shout in a couple days - you know I'm almost 90% gaming and Ive seen a ton of changes - none of which fall into your theory.
GaryTheScubaDiver
Gary Beal
Here in Slovakia, we've lost almost 300 backlinks per website during May since the Google changes :-(
Google has been manipulating traffic and causing wild shifts in results, its gotta stop now.Â
Google search has always been fluid and it is that flux that keeps many a SEO firms working. This will drive clients to the SEO firms, or even to hire an SEO staff.
- Pat
May the first,
was the worst,
day for SEOs.
Longtail is gone
Fallen flat on it's bum,
We're all screwed,
Oh NOES.
Thank you very much.
I actually saw about a 10-15% increase. Hopefully that means Google is pleased with what I'm doing. However, my site is pretty new (
last bit of advice Rand mentions holds true, if you're practicing good seo not much to get worked up about unless there's a huge drop in rankings
I actually wouldn't have known about this update if it hadn't been for all the online discussion (and this WBF) because around this time my site saw an increase in long tail traffice and indexation - this was from a recent change in sitewide navigation that flowed more juice to some product categories that weren't getting enough link love.
And don't worry Rand, even if you're not funny, you're at least not funny one minute, then berating everyone the next!
Thanks guys! I was watching this carefully and will continue to do so. Only so many hrs in a day though! Hope we don't see too much MayDay mayhem going down! Great post!
In general we took a hit in our various sites, but our English language sites have taken the biggest hit from the May Day update.
Hi Rand,
Just checked my blog with a quick site: search...1 indexed page!!! ARGH!
Time to give it a bit more attention lol (had about 20 posts indexed last time i checked)
Do you have a linky for the reference you made to checking which pages had been visited by Google in analytics? One of my clients lost 35% traffic back around March and would be interested to see if the was an indexation issue.
Cheers.
Don't simply trust the site: operator, it's annoyingly buggy and can be wildly inaccuate. Check the indexation of you pages your pages individually with cache: -- you'll get more accurate results that way. I often feel, especially lately, that site:, link: and other such operators are for Google to make fun of us SEOs. Many of them have deteriorated over the years, to the point that their results are meaningless. Have you seen a rash for posts in the forum lately where people are worried they have lost all their links? They haven't, but link: now shows "0 links" much more often than it used to.
Rand, here is a great idea for a post for you. About those damn "advanced Google operators." I could really use inanchor: and allinannchor: for example. But what are they worth, what are we to make of their results? I see that The Art of SEO still talks of these commands as if they were real. But they are not. We need an update! I for one would be grateful.
 And I have got your "wakeup call" re. the Mayday Update. I used to be in denial about all that, but now I'm a believer. :) Thanks as usual.
So it's official, Google has confirmed that the MayDay Update affects the Long Tail!
Hey, it's now even more official: watch this new Matt Cutts video.
I do not know do I have big enough sample but we got 22.5% increase of traffic (organic visitors) and increase in number of keywords from 76,451 to 90,274 keywords... it's like 16% growth in number of keywords. Site has ~20,000 pages.
The sites I have seen have pretty stable traffic numbers. Interesting thing is short keyword traffic has increased while long tail has dropped.
I have the same experience. I saw a change in traffic for one of my sites and it got ~25% more traffic during last two weeks and it basically contains quite a lot of pages targeting long tail.
Where someone looses, somebody else gains. It's not like that traffic is lost somewhere.
OK I hot many private messages asking about link profile of website etc. people try to 'decode' what is going on.
I think major reason is something you forgot that happened and it is quite obvious... we have big INTERFACE change. They have rolled out tools from the left side also I think they have intensify "Did you mean:" feature.
Some of us gained traffic some lost... and most definitely google have kept at least 5% more on their website
Steady 2100 - 2200 landing pages that deliver searchers week after week over the last 2 months. Last week barely 1800 landing pages delivered search. Very interesting stuff, funny I didn't get an Intelligence Alert on this ;)
Good stuff, thanks guys.
Thanks, Rand for this WBF update on the May-Day issue...
The part I liked best was the recommendation to use some 'deep' long-tail phrases in our normal keyword ranking reports...to show us the when and where of a future similar update!
Done!
:-)Jim
Thanks for the great post. Now back to work checking how our clients were impacted by this update.
Best,
Well, I'm just a guy with a small 1 year old e-commerce site, but I figured I'd weigh in anyway.
Because I'm small I am able to monitor my various data points, like white on rice. I've got about 350 keywords that I monitor daily (typically focussing on the top few dozen). My rankings are solid, and there is nothing remarkable to report, there.
Although my niche is just that...a 'niche', on many of my keywords...the 9 sites below me are a who's who of fortune 1000 companies. I lost no ground to them.
However, I had noted (prior to Whiteboard Friday) that the G. had decided to cut my indexed pages by about 40%. Now, I know that many experience large fluctuations in indexed pages, but I never have. My number never seems to move more than 5%-ish in a given week. Fortunately, this has not affected my traffic/sales.
I work in a electrical industry , our website is always affected during a holiday as people are not looking for our service at that time . Since the May day change our site has increased traffic and is ranking for many new keywords . Our main target keywords have increased for number of impressions and click through .
When I look at our data, if anything, it has gone up, not down, but may need a bigger date range to get a definite answer.
couldnt find any drop in ranking on our sites... but we are seeing changes in ranking ... that i am trying to have arough explanation of the changes in rankings....
will keep u posted
We've seen a traffic drop but rankings have stayed the same.Â
We think this is due to the increase in Universal search for longer tail keyphrases so Google are eating more of the potential pie.Â
Anyone seen something similar?Â
Hey Rand,
 Thanks for awesome information. It really helps to get updated with algo changes for May. I was wondering will this be helpful for product pages as well. I have one client who has online product store & everyweek he is pushing few products & needs links for them. I am wondering how to balance these proportion for these products pages.Â
Again thanks for wonderful blog post.
Hey much love coming from The Easy API you guys have been wonderful with the help you have given us to implement your API into ours to make it easier for people to access your wonderful data!
I know that the latest round of Google updates has been really big and overly complicated in some areas to follow exactly what they have done. That's why an article like the one you guys did is so important. Without you we would be lost and trying to figure out what changed and why.
Keep up the great work!Chad