The recent change in Google algorithm seems to work in favor of search engine marketers that apply long-tail keyword strategy to their sites and effectively engage in social media. As indexing systems are 50% faster than before, thanks to Google Caffeine the new indexing infrastructure, searchers can see near real-time results from social networks. Therefore, it is crucial for brands to engage in social media and establish their online presence.
Mayday is an algorithm update that concentrates on how Google ranks these results, giving priority to fresh and updated information deep within the site and to pages optimized for long-tail keywords. Given the blend of Caffeine and Mayday, smaller brands have a great opportunity to rank higher, as Google will see them as more relevant if they fulfill the required criteria.
This is because smaller brands who are experts on their topics have a greater ability to update their site content, pictures, videos, Twitter feeds and blog regularly ensuring each of the pages is fully optimized for long-tail keywords and effective engagement in social media.
The algorithm updates present a challenge for larger brands. Large brand sites relying on high homepage page rank or rather authority in order to rank in search results for deep content without recent updates face this problem. In contrast, smaller sites have an opportunity to rank for their services or products simply by updating content regularly and by engaging in social media. This would be a challenge for major sites having to update 1000’s of pages weekly or even daily.
Local SEO and long tail keywords – Mayday impact
Relevance is still a key… While Vince argument update in spring 2009 concentrates on giving more value to large, high authority websites, enabling them to rank for short keywords, Mayday counter balances this by focusing on long-tail keywords deep within sites. This benefits smaller sites with relevant content giving them a greater chance to compete, ensuring users return with highly relevant search results.
Local SEO has a bright future with Mayday. Mayday looks deeper into a site and people use longer key-phrases while searching. Therefore a site owners role for updating and optimizing the deep pages within a site becomes critical providing a great way to rank highly for long-tail keywords such as location-based keywords.
So what can small and large business do to benefit from these changes? Update content regularly, optimize deep content for long tail keywords and use SEO best practice on all pages. Don’t forget to include social media engagement too.
Impact of Caffeine and Mayday on link building’
Google has not officially stated that Mayday and Caffeine will have any impact on pages that use link farms. However, site owners that decided to engage in these techniques have seen minor warnings. Shame on you!
Google Instant Search
On the contrary to Mayday and Caffeine, Google Instant Search is rumored by some webmasters and search specialists to be detrimental to small websites. Although we do not ‘entirely’ agree with this issue, there are some parts to the theory that we question. Google Instant Search enables a user to see a changing list of results as they type without having to type a request into Google, hitting return, and then seeing a list of results.
It is likely that smaller sites will find drop in traffic as user searching for a long-tail keyword is likely to find the required information at results shown for the first two words. Subsequently they may abandon the search without typing the whole long-tail keyword that the smaller sites optimize their pages for.
As we know that Mayday concentrates on long-tail keywords, Vince ranks high authority websites targeting 1-2 keywords. With Google Instant Search users can find the page by typing the first 2 keywords that Google ranked using Vince algorithm, and as a result, smaller websites will never be found unless the searcher types whole long-tail keywords.
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