Without warning, the recent Google Mayday algorithm changed the way that Google ranks a website for phrases. A very big and ruthless reminder to everyone in the optimisation industry, that we are all still exposed to the activity of the search engine market leader.
So why did Google see a need for change? For many years there has been a few ways in which to target a market for a SEO campaign. In a very competitive market place, one less expensive and time consuming way to get traffic to your site was by targeting long-tail key phrases. These are the less generic terms that are easier to get up the SERP’s for. Until Mayday that is….
By creating content filled landing pages, often from a mix of products and descriptions, Google would then find random phrases with a higher density on that particular page. Then by applying this to hundreds of landing pages following a certain theme, and by having the right meta structure and page layout, many SEO companies managed to get a lot of traffic.
Because Google has a big issue with what it considers to be spam, the company felt it had to make a change to the algorithm to stop websites getting results from this method of SEO. They want to see relevant, fresh and an abundance of user specific content being implemented to pages. This means some of the sites targeting long-tail phrases have now been replaced in the top positions by stronger, unique content led sites.
Anyone wanting to perform for the less generic phrases will now need to concentrate on getting really great scripts and information into their pages- until then the traffic will not arrive.
Tags: Keyword Density, SEO Techniques