Google Confirms Their New Policy of Quality Over Relevancy
Finally after days of letting the webmasters squirm Google confirmed that the algorithm update had an effect on the long tail traffic. Google decided to change the ranking factors of both relevance and quality. Matt Cutts is quoted saying…
“This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”
In the past, if your site had lots of pages of lower quality but high relevance then they would have previously ranked well in Google for those long tail keyword phrases. But now Google has made that relevancy less important in favor of the higher quality pages. E-commerce sites were more likely to see their item description pages with few individual incoming links and less unique content suddenly drop out of sight.
The first thing to do is use your Google Analytics to check late April and early May to see if you suffered any noticeable drops in traffic due to the May Day update. If you’re seeing specific long tail keyword queries drop in rank take the time to search for them on Google.
You may have been better ranked earlier because of relevance, but now Google sees these pages as higher quality and it’s your job to find out why. For the pages that were bringing in significant traffic the way to turn this around is to build incoming links and do what you can to make these pages higher quality.
#1 written by Dell April 12th, 2011 at 11:23
At last, someone comes up with the “right” anwers!