It is over five months since the Google May Day update docked and we still have many SEOs and webmasters talking about it. The last time we covered it was at the end of September, under the May Day Monster.
I wanted to point you back to that thread, where we have a long time contributor to this site (in the form of many many comments). Michael Martinez added what he has seen over the past several months.
Sites complaining about the May Day update all share similar characteristics, Michael said:
- Sites are long-established (2-10 years).
- Sites had well-established referral traffic from popular queries up until August.
- Sites were pushed down to page 2 or further for multiple queries.
- Sites continue to rank well for low-traffic queries.
- The high traffic queries now feature many "well-known" sites that may not necessarily equivalent or better value in terms of content.
- The standard SEO help coming from various forums (including this one) has failed to resolve the issues and left a lot of Webmasters wringing their hands infrustration.
He believes it may be due to:
1) That Google may be paying more attention to on-page (quality) signals
2) That Google may simply have devalued another horde of links
Or none of the above.
Anyway, the discussion is a bit heated in the Google Webmaster Help thread, so have fun.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
