There has been some interesting discussion regarding a possible update from Google which folks have dubbed “MayDay”. Webmasters and search marketers are reporting that they are experiencing large drops in long-tail search traffic especially for large web sites for well established brand that you would think have incorporated clean SEO tactics.
Reports from SEO Roundtable (www.seoroundtable.com) suggest that:
Most of these complaints come over webmasters seeing a huge drop in traffic from Google over “long tail keywords.” Keyword phrases that are 3 or more keywords long. One person said he had a “traffic dropped 50% in a few days, 100,000′s of long tail k/w.” Another person “recovered until this Mid April, when it started seeing some recovery, then bang now 90% of its traffic, mostly long tail disappeared.” Then we get the “me toos,” “that’s exactly what has happened to my site. 50% loss of traffic and constant hammering by googlebot.”
What to do? Monitor your long-tail search traffic might be a good idea to see if Google MayDay has had a negative impact on your organic search traffic. Especially if you are a large e-commerce site, you might want to double check your long-tail non-branded keyword traffic from your analytics. Chances are you might overlook this on a keyword level, but collectively you will want to check for a major traffic decline from organic traffic over the past couple of weeks.
Go to SEO Roundtable for more insight into this matter.
