May day is a day of celebration, marking the end of the winder (in the northern hemisphere) and has been a day of festivities in many countries for centuries.  This year however, May 1st will probably be remembered in our industry for something quite difference – Google’s “Map Day Update” and what many have been calling The Death Of The Long Tail.  While this algorithm change has been dubbed the “Mayday update” it was actually made between April 28th and 2nd May.

Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorthms thoughout the year, but the so called May Day Update has caused quite a stir because it has caused immediate and far reaching changes in rankings, especially for long tail terms.  As usual, nobody outside of Google is 100% sure exactly what was changes, why or how, but there have been many theories.  What is certain though is that rnakings have altered, quite significantly in some cases.

While the exact changes and causes aren’t known for sure, one thing which does seem certain is that long tail terms have been affected to a large degree.  It appears that Google wants bigger authority sites to rank better than micro-niche sites for longtail terms.  This would seem to follow their recent trend towards attempting to improve its index for long tail terms to weed out “thin affiliate” sites and micro niche, keyword domain sites with no real content.

Straight from the horses mouth

While we can speculate about the exact nature of the algorithm changes, there are some things we do know for certain.  Google’s own Matt Cutts has answered a number of questions regarding the update, confirming that it is a permanent algorithm change which does affect long tail more than other searches, and it was done to increase the value of the SERPS for those long tail terms.  Here’s a quick video where Matt answers some questions about the update:

What does this mean in real terms?

Well the first thing is to take advice from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – don’t panic!

First you want to check your stats and find out whether your sites have been affected.  Take a look at your stats from a couple of days before May 1st and a couple of days after, paying specific attention to your long tail referrals.  If they are significantly down then you may want to take action, but don’t start randomly changing things all over the place.  Try to figure out what has been affected, and then take logical action.  It may be that you’ll need to buid new links to certain pages, or redirect some link juice from other parts of your sites.

If your business model relies heavily on long tail, and specifically if you’re building lots of “thin affiliate” sites then you might want to think about your business model, not just because of the Mayday update but due to Google’s trend towards giving less and less rankings to small micro niche sites.  So called “sniper” sites and “Made For Adsense” mini sites appear to be dropping in rankings, and they are likely to continue on that trend.

So what can you do about it?  Well, if you do have a portfolio of micro sites, consider bulking them up.  Build more pages, real content, and more backlinks.  Google likes authority sites, so adding more content to a site, perhaps integrating a blog and some social features, and generally turning your mini sites into valuable resoruces will not only help keep Google on your side, but will likely please your visitors too.  As usual, ask yourself what you can do to add value and generally that will help both your visitors and your rankings – a win-win situation!