This year’s May Day (May 1st) – historically an anniversary observing the Red Revolution in Russia in 1917 – saw a flurry of activity on SEO forums regarding rankings drops for long tail keywords (keyword phrases longer than 4-5 words).
SEO pros and other webmasters have been discussing what they’ve been observing with their traffic for the last several days – even one saying “webmasters from very clean, very large websites report dramatic drops in long tail search traffic. MAYDAY seems to be the appropriate shout-out for those affected.”
Many complaints poured into the WebmasterWorld thread talking about rankings drops for phrases longer than 3 keywords…one post even says his “traffic dropped 50% in a few days, 100,000’s of long tail k/w.”
Another says he was seeing some recovery by mid-April just to see 90% of his long tail keyword traffic fall off by MAYDAY…then many more began saying they’re experiencing the same thing.
WebmasterWorld administrator Tedster gives some insight into what maybe happening – and that is Google is making a change in how they approach their phrase-based indexing, which is made possible by their new Caffeine infrastructure. Before, long tail keyword search results were “best guesses” – interpretations on what you’re trying to say.
Assume that any five words put together could constitute a long-tail keyword phrase – that’s literally so many combinations that your head will spin off, including any computers. Therefore, Google simply guessed what you were trying to look for.
“Something very real has shifted at Google, but apparently it takes a certain type of webmaster/website to notice it – significant long tail traffic closely monitored in detail,” Tedster says.
If you target long tail keywords, are you seeing any significant decline in traffic?
This year’s MAYDAY certainly was certainly a milestone in Google’s update with Caffeine…check back again for more on Caffeine and what it means but don’t be too concerned about this if you have a good, crawlable site with engaging content that’s relevant to your market – in the end, that’s what matters!