Has The Google Mayday Update Affected You?	Visited: 1360 5.0/5.0 (16 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Nick Stamoulis June 09, 2010

Las month Google released the Mayday update which has left many webmasters, entrepreneurs and website owners sort of scrambling around to make up for lost rankings. Here is a prime example why website owners should never put all their eggs into one basket. Websites that simply rely on search rankings for success are always prone to a search engine update that could quickly disrupt all further online success.

What is the Mayday update?

Google released an update in May called the Mayday update that directly affected the way the search engines index pages targeting long tail phrases like larger ecommerce websites that have product pages that are several clicks away from a home page and traditionally target long tail keywords for rankings. Basically website owners that might own a large ecommerce website that is typically populated with manufacturer information surrounding a particular product took a hit in rankings. According to the chatter on the web many websites have been affected in a negative manner. I think this might have been the update that everyone was scared about before the holidays in 2009 when Google came out and said that the algorithm change would not go through before the holidays so they wouldn’t disrupt any websites gearing up for holiday sales.

How can I fix lost rankings?

Matt Cutts has stated that there are ways that a website owner can fix these problems and regenerate some of those lost rankings. Websites that might have great and unique content with individual products that other sites linked directly to did not feel as much of an impact as websites that might just have populated manufacturer product data that might already exist on other ecommerce websites selling the same products.

Google is always making search engines tweaks and changes to allow for the most relevant data to populate in search results. This is why it is important to really diversify your online marketing approach and have other streams of web traffic coming in at all times. Slapping up product pages with very little effort and uniqueness has now proven to be ineffective. Google is making a strong step forward to really allow the best and brightest web pages to appear in search results so the end user experience is nothing but amazing.