Noticed a recent drop in your websites’ ranking for long term keywords? Well, Google rolled out an update (which has been dubbed “May Day” by Webmaster World), and a BIG update at that. Google is consistently tweaking their algorithm to keep the best, most accurate websites ranking for their keywords. This is what separated Google in the 90s, because they were able to deliver accurate results to their visitors.  Google released the “May Day Update” in late April, with many sites taking a hit around April 28th to May 3rd, with a loss of 5-15% in long tail keyword traffic. If your website gets a majority of its traffic from long tail keywords than you’d see a large drop in your visitor stats.

Google mentioned that they released their new algo mainly because MFA (Made For Adsense) sites were abusing the way the old system worked, they would build a ton of links from different sites targeting their long-tail, low competition, high search volume keywords and would obtain first position in the SERPs for them. With the new Google Caffeine, some websites also got damaged for their long-tail keyword traffic.

How can you tell if your site was damaged? Mainly look at your visitor stats, if you see a drop between April 23rd and May 3rd than you’d most likely lost some long-tail keyword traffic. Can you recover? Of course you can, you’ll just need to put a off-page SEO plan into action, and get your website some good quality links to go to your long-tail keyword pages.