Desperation Time: Need a Magic Bullet to Recover from Mayday

[Planet13]

Things are quite bleak right now...

Is there anyone who has anything at all resembling a Magic Bullet for regaining rankings / traffic after the May Day update?

Has anybody figured out whether right now, as of July 2010, if there is ONE BEST THING TO DO to get rankings back up?

Unfortunately we don't have enough resources to try everything that you are SUPPOSED to do (on page optimization, link building, social networking, adding more pages, refresh content, etc.,).

If you have any stories of "I did this and low and behold, my rankings improved," please share them with the group.

Thanks in advance.

[tangor]

Site wide tweaks seem to get hit. A few dozen pages per site tweaked every week seem to fair better. Reserve the bullet for other uses as there is no magic these days.

Will say that semantically correct pages (titles, h1 and lesser), those optimized for accessibility, fresh content (or updated content) are liked by the SEs (remember, Bing and Yahoo are included in this as well).

The one thing I did last year, and YMMV, is I removed all meta from one site (where much kw duplication occurred due to the nature of the beast) and saw an immediate--month later and since--bump in listing and traffic. However, what works for one site may not work for another. Test it in small batches. Get results. Make decisions, then roll it out over a reasonable time period instead of all at once.

And be patient. G has all this accumulated data they simply will NOT discard regardless of how outdated, which makes sites 10 years or over more susceptible to "weird results". Sites <2 years don't seem to have the same problem...unless they have 10,000 or more pages...

We are all fighting the new guys, the cash, the brands, and changes in SE behavior in that regard. Getting difficult for the mom & pop web site to get above the fold... yet, somethings can be done. Some work. Others don't. Webmasters like a challenge, even if they are challenged in commerce by google (in particular) or other SEs. Keep working at that, but at the same time find other markets and methods for getting the message out. Put all your eggs in one basket, expect scrambled from time to time...

[HuskyPup]

And have you seen results from that (either positive or negative since you did it on a (more-or-less) site-wide basis?

Definitely positive across the site. The pages which were at the top of the SERPs actually look better now I've improved their titlebars and meta descriptions and those which had dropped have either gone back to the top or nearly back.

When I write about changed titlebars I do not mean all new keywords etc, it was similar to:

keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 keyword5 keyword6 - Company Name

keyword1 keyword2 keyword4 keyword5 refinedkeyword3 - Company Name

A few dozen pages per site tweaked every week seem to fair better.

An interesting observation and would make sense. In total on this site there about ~50 sections and each section has between 10-50 in-depth pages of product description. Obviously I didn't update them all at once, I improved them a section at a time as and when I found the time to do them over a couple of months.

I'm pretty sure that the SEs don't see this as tinkering or a deliberate SERPS manipulation attempt but as a genuine informational improvement from, in my case, an evergreen authority site.