Mayday Algorithm Update - with video from Matt Cutts

[tedster]

For all who have been looking for a more official word about Google's ranking changes around the beginning of May, Matt Cutts has released a video on Google's Youtube channel for Webmaster Help.

YouTube

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4132195.htm

edited by brett tabke (embedded link)

[Shaddows]

Estimated loss in sales approx: $2500.

Absolute numbers are difficult to interpret. We've lost maybe 10x as much in cash terms, that's a fraction of our revenue.

@syedali
Yes, as per my prev post:

Traffic up, sales up, referrals different.

Specifically, we're getting more traffic (that's converting well) to fewer pages. It would be wrong to say it's a shift FROM longtail, because the gained traffic is itself longtail.

[steerpikegg]

< moved from another location >

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere, but I found this pretty amusing in a depressing sort of way - it shows some example searches and the unexpected results returned. [cash-bandit.com ]

[edited by: tedster at 8:10 pm (utc) on Jun 8, 2010]

[trakkerguy]

steerpikegg - I'm no fan of the recent changes by G, but...

I just checked the 9 example searches shown in the link you posted in Bing and guess what? The results were only better in 2 of the 9 terms listed.

[vandread]

trakkerguy, the problem is that Google Search did provide better results before the update and that the quality of results has gone down, at least for searches that I regularly conduct.

[scottsonline]

@trakkerguy, but up until this update was there EVER a time when the other search engines were better than Google? That's what I don't understand about this update - it's like they want to give Yahoo/Bing a fair shot.

[trakkerguy]

I agree - the recent changes have not improved the results for terms I watch. In fact, I believe that (so far) they are worse.

I'm just saying that picking 9 terms that G does poorly on, and seeing that bing does better on 2 of those 9 doesn't really prove much.

[mantucket]

FWIW, google now declaring victory in rolling out caffeine:
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

So perhaps we can rule that out?

Yet I'm still seeing lots of plain old buggy instability:

I tried some queries using my domain name to see whether the relevance of the top results improved any - what should be the 'obvious' match came up first only once. More interestingly, though, when I clicked on 'Cached' result, I got errors - in about 8 of 10 cases! Is anyone else seeing this?

[Robert Charlton]

...google now declaring victory in rolling out caffeine...

I don't know whether that means that they've fully populated it with a new index and tuned it, or just that it's in place and everything's operating on that file system. At the moment, I'm assuming just the latter.

[CainIV]

At the moment, I'm assuming just the latter.

I would agree with you Robert, as it does seem as though a re-indexing and increase in pages over the last 3-4 four days seems to be a trend, for the websites I watch, in various types of genres.

[dstiles]

Mantucket - I don't use google for "real" searches much now but I searched today for a specific domain name, which was not in the SERPS; when I clicked on an info site's cache I got an error. Google UK.

[anand84]

it shows some example searches and the unexpected results returned. [cash-bandit.com ]

Ironically, the site appears to be a luck-riding content-scraper in itself. I just read the very same article on another blog a couple of days back.

[mantucket]

hello? Is anyone still discussing MayDay or trying to diagnose it or has had success recovering from it?

I noticed something new in my Webmaster Tools this AM: the link count to the index page for my subdomain of interest jumped from about 85 to 475! I.e., it went back to reporting the number of links it used to know about before Mayday.

In addition, the Links To My Site seems broken - it no longer sorts pages by number of links descending.

Has anyone else noticed something like this? What should we make of it?

[tedster]

There are several comments about the changes in backlinks around the forum, just this morning. It seems only to be a shake up in reporting, and most people did not see a rankings or traffic change on its basis.

See:
3:Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2010 [webmasterworld.com]
Change to Webmaster Tools link reporting [webmasterworld.com].