A WebmasterWorld thread has a few, not many, webmasters and SEOs talking about a possible tweak to the MayDay algorithm tweak.
For those of you who do not know what MayDay is, it was a pretty significant ranking algorithm change that took place around the same time Google pushed through their index update, named Caffeine. You can learn a bit more about MayDay over here.
Some webmasters and SEOs are suggesting there was a tweak to this ranking algorithm change over the weekend. The discussion is at WebmasterWorldwhere Senior Member drall said:
We spotted Mayday a few days before it became widespread. I am seeing the same type of update happening again on our largest property. Another large scale whack to longtail is in the works this week.
Drall then spent some time digging through data and provided the following information:
We have had a almost complete rotation of our top 10,000 producing phrases. I think this is some form of social networking factoring being amped up at least for us. - Pages which have strong backlinks and social networking usage have risen 10% on average. - Pages which have strong backlinks and no social networking usage have dropped 20% on average. - Pages which have weak or no backlinks but have some social networking usage have risen 5% on average.Even though the majority of the social networking ibls have nofollow hundreds of times I have proven internally that these links are now counting for something of greater importance now (at least with us).
Over the last 30 days we have seen record levels of googlebot activity on this site. I chalked it up to some simple navigation optimization and removal of duplicate footprint junk but here is what the overall picture is telling me.
Google recrawled our entire site and reweighed it through a completely different system that takes social networking aspects into account more. It's as if they are looking at the site through a different engine now.
The thing is, not too many people are talking about ranking shifts in Google over the weekend. If this was major, trust me, there would be a mass revolt going on. In any event, this may be impacting just a limited number of sites or just his site. Hard to say at this point, but there was some interesting discussion here that I thought may help some of our readers.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
