Google’s MayDay Update: Friend or Foe?

by keith on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 | No Comments

As you may have heard, Google recently made a change to their algorithm that has affected some site owners. It has been dubbed the MayDay update. You could have either benefited by this, or had your traffic slashed. The difference seems to be in what type of site you are.

This is an algorithmic change aimed at improving the search results returned for longtail search queries. Large sites that have product pages with scant unique content within them, and precious few links as well are the most impacted. Many times they contain only a manufacturers product description, and very little more. To complicate this, they are several tiers removed from the home page, internal linking is suspect, and not enough deep linking is to be found. The days of popping in a manufacturer’s product description and perhaps changing a few words are likely gone.

This would seem to make a case for flatter site architecture, as well as the need to pump more original content into “thin” product pages. Much like when Google targeted “thin affiliate pages”, this seems to be along the same lines.

Let’s let Google’s Matt Cutts have the last word!