I know that no one knows the answer as to whether or not what really is or isn’t the factors in google’s new algorithm and not everyone is in a panic like I am to fix whatever the issue is and move forward.
My biggest speculation as to why so many of my sites have essentially dropped off the face of the earth is due to my content not containing enough Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) words. When I outsourced my content, I did not give additional LSI words to be used within the articles (except one week when I conducted a test for ranking faster but more on that in a bit). Today as I was checking my sites to see whether or not Google was going to be kinder to them (which is clearly not the case) I got quite depressed after seeing so many “not in top 100″ results coming up. So I stopped after about 40 site rank checks.
These are the sites that are ranking on page 1 in the SERPs.
3 – Google Sniper Sites ranking in the top 3 positions (untouched for a year now)
1 – niche blog (over 60 posts)
4 – xfactor micro niche sites
Its pretty depressing when I see that I have 104 websites in my empire and now I only have 8 sites ranking well. But anyhow the common denominator amongst all of these ranking sites is that they all incorporate LSI words. I used The Ultimate Keyword Theme Extractor today to confirm that each of those xfactor sites are using a minimum of 3 additional LSI words in the content.
When I built my Google Sniper sites, I did just as George suggested in his book regarding setting up posts and using LSI words and obviously my results on rankings for these sites that have not budged in a year prove George was right!
I got lazy when I was cranking out my xfactor sites and I was not so picky about using LSI words. I think that was a huge and costly mistake.
To further prove my point on LSI playing a significant role on sites ranking versus the other speculations as to back links, PR and age domain; I directly asked a guy on xfactor’s forum that has been consistently doing $60 days with his micro niche sites and he has not noticed any drop in earnings, site ranking or traffic. he did confirm that his sites do use LSI words in his content and that he had even fixed his content to now use LSI words if pages were not optimized before.
Then I spoke with my friend Jon or as some of you may know of him, he’s The Secret Jon. Dang there are so many Jon’s I speak of nowadays and I even have a romantic interest in a guy named Jon whom is not The Secret Jon. Oh gees! Anyhow, Jon was completely shocked yesterday when I told him about the Mayday Update. he had no idea there was even such a Google phenomenon. And how should he take notice when his sites remain unchanged in traffic, rankings and earnings?! I started to talk with Jon about why does he think his sites are still ranking. Now he only has a handful of xfactor sites and would be considered pretty thin with only 1-3 pages of content. But the one thing he has been firm on since he started building these sites back in January was that he was all about LSI words in the content. He wrote all his content himself and he really noticed how crucial LSI words were after embarking on the Google Sniper method last fall; so he made sure to include LSI words into his content.
Jon also said something that I totally agree with.
it just makes sense, google wants relevant content, so it’s gotta have relevant words
the algorithm probably has something that detects what percentage of LSI keywords are in the content
I would guess it’s as important….maybe now even more important than the main keyword itself
This is the only conclusion I have right now to help bring my income back to life. I stand firm and do not think this is about how many backlinks a page has. Just look at the search results for “nut chopper” without the quotes and look at the nextag page. It has 1 back link and its in position #4.
I don’t think its necessarily about authority or PR sites. Just enter “stop nail biting” and you will see the #3 position is a PR 1 Squeeze page and its beating Amazon #9 which has a PR4.
So where do I go from here? I am going to start going over my sites one at a time and add more LSI words from a list I will build using TUKTE.
Yesterday’s adsense earnings were only slightly higher at $14.94. Still has me worried.
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Fantastic post Sara,
You may be on something here. If you’ve spoken to several people and they seem to say that LSI is working then you ‘MAY: be right. You’ve also got your Sniper sites to back you up.
By the way, if you do a search for ‘Mayday Update’ and select the latest link, your is right up there
Nettech recently posted..How will I rise above Googles Mayday Update?
Pardon my ignorance, but could you define LSI words. I may know what you are talking about but don’t understand the abbreviation. On the other hand, I may be totally clueless. Thanks in advance.
Kidgas recently posted..Revamping Old Content
Sorry, I should have clarified. LSI = latent semantic indexing
I put the main kw in the first paragraph and the last and I throw 2 LSI KW’s in there somewhere. My sites have maintained the same ranking, but the traffic has still dropped.
I think I forgot to add this to my inner pages with the long tail KW’s-to some of them. I will have to check this out!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
Hi Sara this is a superb observation! That is something that I had never done and in all means sounds logical as Big G are looking for a richer user experience. So let say if I generated a list of LSI, what is the ideal number of LSI words and their density do we add in our articles?
Tinman recently posted..Day 66 – Ploughing On After G Mayday Aftermath
As far as density goes, I am not sure. I did notice that of the additional LSI words my sites had, they used them a minimum of twice in a 500 word article. I’m planning on using at least 3 LSI words and using each of those twice in my content.
Check out this article on LSI here.
I will be honest. I don’t even know what LSI words are and my sites weren’t effected. All I do when I write my content is make sure it reads like a human wrote it. I don’t even worry about how many times I used the main keyword.
If your right though, it would definitely explain why so many people are having such different results.
Actually let me be more clear. My sites weren’t effected *that much*.
This is what I kind of do too. To be honest, I’m too lazy to use LSI all the time, but I always did truly believe that if I write for HUMANS as opposed to completely for search engines, the LSI would take care of itself.
I guess what you’ve seen Sara is that it doesn’t necessarily! This is a really interesting thing you’ve noticed and definitely worth looking into more.
Ruth – Web Career Girl recently posted..Finding the Balance Between New Content and Marketing
This is how *I write* as well – I figured if LSI = an algorithmic way to measure organic groupings of semantically relevant terms, then…guess what?
We’re humans…the algo is trying to emulate the way we think, so I figured if we just wrote naturally…
This is helpful information, Sara.
It made me want to buy the them extractor – but then I saw the hefty price tag, and realized I already have two tools for LSI.
Goog’l3s “Wonder Wheel” and the Micro Niche Finder – it can dig up the LSI terms if you left-click a keyword – but I haven’t used that function, ever.
Wonder if it still works after the recent upgrade…anyway, here’s a link for the MNF users:
[http://micronicheblog.com/?cat=10]
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
I’m pretty sure there are free programs that can analyze a website, just can’t remember where I have seen them. I’m talking to spy on your competitors that are now ranking well.
For looking for your own variants what you mentioned would work along with the good ole Adwords KW Suggestion tool.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
Yes, that’s true those those tools can do it for you but what is so great about TUKTE is that is is analyzing more closely the top sites ranking for any given KW. So basically you tell the software to examine the first 5 sites that rank for a keyword and its looking for common keywords shared by them. Certainly if the top sites feel those keywords are important, then so should you. This is especially ideal when you are writing new content about a niche that is foreign to you. With some niches you will need to learn certain lingo etc, and this software makes it easy to do.
Again, I am not saying you need to buy it. I just think it helps with some of the dirty work.
Very interesting observation. I have a small collection of websites but I have never targeted LSI keywords. I haven’t checked the sites to see if they have LSI keywords already. All my sites are still ranking in the same positions though. Will follow your progress after adding LSI. Your post is much appreciated.
Very interesting observation. I have a small collection of websites but I have never targeted LSI keywords. I haven’t checked the sites to see if they have LSI keywords already. All my sites are still ranking in the same positions though. Will follow your progress after adding LSI. Your post is much appreciated.
Well, it will be interesting to see what happens when you modify your content. I have never worried about LSI and I have maintained my rankings. I always figured LSI words would occur naturally when you write.
Still, I had never really thought about analyzing the KWs for my top competitors. I’ve seen it talked about in passing but never paid it much thought. It might be a neat exercise, thanks for sharing.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
In thinking about this more, did you look at your competitor’s LSI mix where you lost rankings?
I would say that if your theory were correct that one could still rank well not b/c they used LSI but because neither did their competitors. I’m sure Google changed a few things with this algo update so it would likely be difficult to pin things down, but still interesting.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
@ Sara – That may be part of the issue here. I still think most importantly, the KW domain bump was removed. But, Google did say they wanted content to be king, and I think there are very few ways, besides LSI keywords & length, for a robot to gauge content.
Let me start by saying, the majority of my adsense sites main pages are holding fairly steady. This lends weight to what Sara is saying based on the way I write a majority of my content. The way I structure my main page for most of my niche sites is like this:
1. When I do my KW research I pick at least 5 terms, 1 main and 4+ related terms, depeding on how many good ones there are with decent traffic.
2. I write my main portion of my content (400 words) of the main page about the main keyword. Then I write 1 paragraph related to each of the related keywords.
3. Then I write the sub-pages based on the related keywords, each with a small intro to the main topic and then 500 words about that specific sub category of that main topic.
Many of my sub-pages lost traffic, but my main pages are still ranking where they were and receiving traffic and clicks. The main page, because of the way I structure the paragraphs, contains LSI keywords. The sub pages don’t necessarily. So my sites tend to follow your line of thinking Sara.
An example of how I write my content for main pages would be… using the keyword Taco’s because it’s random..and sub-pages are Hard Shell Taco’s, Soft Shell Taco’s, Taco Salad, and Taco Sauce.
Main portion, I describe taco’s in 400-500 words. I discuss why i like them, how they are easy to make, what I put on taco’s, etc. Interesting information about taco’s.
Then I say, when it comes to taco’s, there are 4 main things you need to understand to have the best tacos. After that lead-in, I write 1 pragraph for each of the 4 related KW. So it looks like this:
1. Taco taco Taco I love Taco (500 words)
2. To understand taco’s, understand this: (Tie-in Paragraph)
3. Hard Shell Taco’s (100 Word Description)
4. Soft Shell Taco’s (100 Word Description)
5. Taco Salad (100 Word Description)
6. Taco Sauce (100 Word Description)
It may be a little more work, but because I target keywords with a little higher competition, and just grind out the backlinks to get it to rank, the earnings make up for it in the long run.
The change did effect my deep pages in varying degrees however. That also trends with Sara’s line of thinking.
Anyways, just wanted to share some of my thoughts since I haven’t been posting on my blog lately.. =P
MatthewDC recently posted..Earnings Update
Thats an absolutely fantastic post Mathew. Thanks for that.
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
That’s an excellent suggestion for incorporating LSI words into your content! Thanks for sharing this Matthew. I will try this since it looks like an easier and more natural way to transition into the related keywords form the main focus keyword.
Matt,
I was curious on how you said you made inner pages for your LSI kws. If you were to incorporate more kws into those inner pages like your inner page on taco salad you could throw in more LSI kws like taco salad recipe and etc. Would that work? Maybe I am seeing it wrong (if anyone can understand me!) It just seems like it would be a good way to boost back up the inner pages also!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
The key is to ensure that you get the balance right and don’t get carried away, I’m pretty sure thats where my pages suffered too.
I’d also like a further elaboration on this if possible please!
Thanks
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
Kelly,
If the inner page KW had enough searches to make it worth it, then it would probably work. The problem was, previously we were working under the assumption that we were getting the biggest boost on our main term due to the keyword phrase, and the farther away from it we get, the less we see the bonus. So at some point, it would be more valuable to make another site.
For instance, if I find 5 high search KW related to Taco Salad alone, I would make a Taco Salad domain for the boost and have that be a separate site.
Now, with the domain bonus looking null and void, it isn’t so much an issue, and you could probably deep link like crazy.. for instance, make a site called TacoMania.com and have every single taco related keyword you could find as a subpage and just deep link like crazy.
Now that is all speculation, but I think honestly, post mayday, we have a much wider selection of domains now, as we don’t have to stick to this archaic TacoSaladRecipe30Min.com theory.
So, to sum it up, yes, you are thinking correctly that it would help the sub page to include LSI keywords when building the content. It’s just that I have to think about how much work I can really find time to do, and researching LSI keywords for every subpage and then so on and so on was too much work.
Now however, I am going to re-think that. Does that help at all?
matthewdc recently posted..Earnings Update
I will make a post in the next 3-4 days on my blog in regards to my plan moving forward. I think Sara and I are going to end up on the same page as to our angle post mayday..
That is why I love the way we all have our blogs structured though. We are going to have plenty of quality and informative conversations over the next several weeks as to what is working, what isn’t, and what methods we can all focus on..
I think Sara was on to something.. and I think the authority site structure is and has always been the best method…
matthewdc recently posted..Earnings Update
Thank you,
Yes that does help and I will be watching the progress of both of you to see how it pans out!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
I will be taking leave this week to do my final for my class and take a break. During this break I will try to sit down and look at my sites. For those of you that know about my Secret Project site.. the rankings were effected on those sites, which I see as a good thing. While they hadn’t made it into the top 5 or anything, site C dropped 10 or so spots, D dropped more, and the other three fell off the earth (not suprisingly as I showed them little attention, aside from E).
I am going to incorporate some LSI keywords into the title & keywords, as well as institute an H2 and paragraph for each of the LSI KW’s I just researched for that project. Basically, I’m gonna LSI site C & D and see if it effects the rankings at all… So for those of you that know the sites address, stay tuned this week and we can give it a little test and maybe shed some light on Mayday…
MatthewDC recently posted..Earnings Update
Excellent Matthew! I look forward to seeing the change in your rankings for this test.
Good luck with the final!
Good luck with the finals Mathew.
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
what was yesterdays figure? I had my highest traffic day ever…….. but my eCPM and CTR still sucked… total earnings were nearly back to normal, only slightly lower. What the hell is going on…. I checked all my main keywords for my xfactor sites, and their rankings have held. I dont even know what LSI is, so im not using it. Be careful of spending too much time on something that will probably make no difference… I think you should focus on backlinks. As for the exact match domain being weakened, I dont see that. I have sites with 0 backlinks sitting in the top 5 based on exact match domain and content only.
Your situation is probably in relation to the competition in your niche. For instance, what are the EXACT searches per month, and PR/BL of competition? Ultimately, Googles algorithm is still going to boil down to links and link quality and content as it always has. So sites that didn’t need the domain bump (a.k.a. tons of quality backlinks and content already), haven’t shifted.
I can almost gurantee that a large part of these changes people are seeing is due to the loss of the KW as domain advantage Google was giving sites. Universally, based on the outrcry in the community and who is being effected, these are the only sites I have heard of suffering badly. Most authority sites have held from what I have heard.
Backlinking will help as it always has, I think everyone is still on board that boat. No matter what they changed, I am positive backlinking is still the #1 aspect of rankings. But, if you can get a boost by adding in 4 or 5 related terms, why wouldn’t you?
MatthewDC recently posted..Earnings Update
I disagree with this comment:
Judging from my personal network of blogs — all under 6 months for the most part — I haven’t lost anything.
5-6 pages of content
exact match domain names
XFactor template (SuperOptimized from ThemeFactory)
No loss in ranking. It’s easy to get caught up in the theories, and I do respect you highly, Matt, you’ve done tons of work and I learn from your experiments, but this just doesn’t fit what I’m seeing.
CTR isn’t down
Traffic only moderately
Adsnes3 not really down…
I have “thin” and young sites. They’re in the top 1-2 pages, really no movement, only one exception…
I wouldn’t disagree with the idea that you need to have BL/quality content – but most of my sites **except the first three** have 1-6 BLs from BMD, 1-2 EZA…that’s it.
6 backlinks in the top 10 SERPs, same as before? Doesn’t fit — unless the content is so good…which I am NOT bragging about: I didn’t even write these sites — I outsourced to the Philippines, Pakistan and India…I was experimenting….
I wouldn’t call them “quality” sites, they actually *suck* imho, but I thought I was going to cut some corners and farm out the writing while I focused on some big Elance gigs.
Now I’m glad I did. They’re still there…crummy content or no. DEFINITELY NOT LSI’d…
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Thank You, Google, For Mayday: Why Right Now Is The Best Time To Be An Internet Marketer
It seems like whatever theory is put forth there is a site that disproves it. There are too many variables involved here.
I think the only thing a person can do is try things on a site-by-site basis. LSI might help one site but that doesn’t mean it would help another.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
James – When I refer to sites that don’t need the bump and have tons of quality backlinks and content, I am talking about in competitive niches.
The fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed, only a few little tricks that I think Google slapped down a bit because they didn’t like them being manipulated.
But fundamentals are still the same. If you have more links, from better quality sites, better density, and proper tags etc, than the rest of the people high in the serps, you are still going to outrank them.
It all still boils down to strength of competition. What I am suggesting is, the sites that were utilizing the domain bump to beat out people with a few more links and a bit higher quality rating, now dropped because of it.
I am still trying to contemplate what the reason for Sara’s sites dropping out of the top 100 is however. It almost seems like there was some sort of penalty instituted, but i’m not prepared to speculate on that yet…
Everyone just needs to keep in mind that SEO principles you have learned from day 1 still apply. You just have to be better than your competition. That means, KW density, links, quality of links, domain age, etc….
Without knowing the sites and the exact numbers for competition etc, I can’t make any verified observations, but I think your results as opposed to others may stem from SOC.
My sites that didn’t get bumped off the map also have tons of backlinks. I don’t have a single main page for my money sites that has less than 250-300 backlinks.
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
Thanks for clarifying. I disagree with this comment, based on an interview I just had with Aaron Wall of SEOBook:
I don’t find in the literature anywhere where Google is now penalizing or not “bumping” exact match domains…I think there’s still an advantage.
Personally, I think Sara’s observation on LSI terms may be the missing link, but then again, I’m still new.
It will be interesting to watch your sites/experiment, however.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Off The Wall – Aaron Wall Of SEOBook Grants The Average Genius An Interview
Well Google has a tendency to not document the majority of the under the hood changes they make. For instance, Google never publicly stated that there even WAS a keyword as domain boost to begin with, at least to my knowledge..
We know it effected long tails more than anything. I know personally it effected some of my deep pages that weren’t really BL heavy but were still on competitive terms, but didn’t effect my heavily linked main pages.
As per your comment on your blog about focusing on what we know still works, that is why I said earlier that fundamentals are still sound. My sites with quality linking are still ranking for competitive terms, despite being long tail to an extent.
But the LSI thing still comes to the forefront, as like I said before, my main pages are actually LSI’d and my deep pages are not.
It’s gonna be a while before people get the full picture, but I firmly believe solid fundamental SEO still works as it always has.
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
The other benefit of adding the LSI words is you will suddenly receive additional traffic from those new related keyword and variations of them. When you leave out LSI words you essentially leave money on the table so it certainly is something to start learning about.
I never thought about it but this ultimately could be why my sites were only averaging $1-3 a day. Had I had LSI words in place, I could have possibly made them hit closer to $5 a day.
Well, sounds like your mind is made up. Hope it improves your rankings and gets your earnings back up. Will follow your progress as always. Dan.
Talking about me in your blog, well don’t I feel special! Lol yeah LSI is where it’s at. I only have less than 20 sites, but yes the ones where I put in effort and made sure to use the LSI keywords are ranking pretty well and don’t seem to have been affected by this May day thing.
Yesterday (before I even posted this blog post) I went ahead and added several LSI words to my authority micro niche site I was working on for my challenge. Last week it dropped off the face of the earth to position 100+ and today it is already on page 3. I don’t know if its a coincidence or if some other “settling” on Google’s part is occurring but I do find it interesting and I will update more about this later.
One thing you may want to look at and see if you see a trend – frequency of updates. Are the sites that you got hit with updated often? Reading up one people that got hit, it looks like there’s a lot of 5-10 page sites that were “set and forget.” Google wants freshness and their goal is ultimately real time crawling. It would be interesting to check that out before making big changes to your content. That may not be it at all.
I don’t see anywhere in the Google documentation that would suggest freshness is an issue whatsoever.
Take “TheSiteWizard” dot com – no loss in traffic, definitely not “fresh” content…
And all my sites have NO fresh content on them, they’re the thin sites you describe. I would have to 100% disagree.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Off The Wall – Aaron Wall Of SEOBook Grants The Average Genius An Interview
TheSiteWizard has no fresh content? Perhaps you missed the main page update:
“7 June 2010
New article: How to Change the Background of Your Website in Dreamweaver CS5. Learn how to use Dreamweaver CS5 to set the background colours (“colors”) of your web page or use an image as the backdrop for the various parts of your website in this chapter of the Dreamweaver CS5 Tutorial.”
They’re obviously an authority site as well.
Here’s a insight for you:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Caffeine-is-Now-Serving-Fresh-Web-Content-Faster-Than-Bing-Yahoo-772860/
“Indeed, Google software engineer Carrie Grimes wrote in a blog post:
Content on the Web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average Web page is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”
Touche – I was last on the Site Wizard months ago, it looked “dead” but the content (i.e. HTML etc.) was still relevant, as the programming language hasn’t changed.
As to the authority site deal: Yes, I know it’s an authority site — and I’m not debating that authority sites are a “bad” idea — all I’m countering is your speculation that “thin” sites — i.e.: my ENTIRE network (if you can call my little tiny slice a network at this point) — are now penalized.
In answer to that:
1) No – my sites are NOT updated often…yet there they stand, and some have even GAINED ranking.
2) Google wanting freshness ? No doubt, but to assume that my thin, not-updated sites are going to suffer — I don’t see it.
I’m not arguing, however, that new content and thicker sites are a “bad” idea – I just disagree with your observation/speculation — it doesn’t fit my facts.
I’ll take my facts/hard data over anyone’s speculation any day, no offense meant.
Another reason I even bothered with the comment was *not to be rude* but rather to contribute my own observations — I have NO IDEA why my sites are doing as well as they are across the board. I didn’t use LSI data…I didn’t even write the content to most of my sites (though the sites where I did write my own content are faring better than those I quickly outsourced).
In moving the conversation forward, my entire aim is simply to *inform you* that your speculation doesn’t fit what I’m seeing on my end.
I don’t mean you disrespect in any way, but I also don’t buy into this fear-mongering and speculation. And that’s all it is: speculation. It doesn’t fit what I’m observing.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Off The Wall – Aaron Wall Of SEOBook Grants The Average Genius An Interview
@James – I know this isn’t my thread or argument, but just wanted to say, a lot of us are here and frequent these discussions specifically to see the hard facts and data that everyone is offering up so that we can all cross reference and try to come up with concrete advice and ideas.
I know I appreciate everyone’s knowledge, experience, examples, and yes, even criticism, because that is how we grow our businesses, our community, and this industry moving forward.
So keep posting your results and info about your sites James. Having sites that didn’t get hammered by Mayday like Sara’s and Mikes could offer up valuable information on what this update effected.
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
P.S. been waiting for the interview, about to read it now… =)
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
Thanks — twice.
I am *still* the new one on the block, and for the record, I keep coming back NOT because I know what I’m doing…I keep coming back because YOU ALL DO.
And I’m here as a student more than anything — So that to say, I hope I didn’t come off as some know-it-all jerk.
Jackson/Matt, especially to you two: I’m not arguing because I have the answers…just more questions.
And I’m certainly NOT arguing because I have a *clue* what my data means — I can only guess that the LSI may be the winning “link” — and have to agree that the basics of SEO are definitely still in play (even for G: in fact, Matt C.utts and the entire G SE *depend* on SEO — we are, after all, optimizing so the reader and the search engine can find our sites).
Anyhow, I don’t want to nor mean to cause any debate, though that’s what it might seem like. I only hope to contribute to the success of the current discussion: figuring out what’s going on.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Off The Wall – Aaron Wall Of SEOBook Grants The Average Genius An Interview
No worries on my side James, I like your comments.
Plus, we all are here as “students”, even Sara on her own blog. We do this so we can all learn and grow, that’s why it’s so awesome.
I’m a big fan of the increased commenting and almost forum like fever we have going here..
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
No disrespect taken. Likewise, not trying to be argumentative, but offer a different perspective, another set of eyes as to why rankings may have gone down. I’ve been full time for almost 10 years now in IM. I’m not some newbie making 10 bucks a day. My network of sites gets approx. 25K uniques per day, a vast majority of that from Google. I’m just offering a little insight from what I see and what I know about how my rankings work. My largest site is 10K per day and I’m in the top 10 for an extremely completive term, I know how to rank. Believe me, I’m not offended in the slightest if anyone takes my advice or suggestions. I’m certainly not trying to fear monger anyone lol, I have nothing to sell and won’t ever link my sites for views or backlinks. All I know, Sara’s sites are tanking and obviously there’s something on there that Google doesn’t like. She needs to take a look at all possible angles.
The past few days it seems like I’m just causing unnecessary controversy, and sidetracking the entire purpose of commenting, so I’ll just stop altogether. I should be working anyway. Good luck Sara, hope you get to your $5K someday.
I’m just gonna jump in uninvited and say, for the most part James I agree with you. Some of the speculation made doesn’t fit with my sites, but all people can do at this point is speculate and try to test.
BUT, one thing I can’t stand is the use of term “fear-mongering” whenever someone takes the more conservative approach. The fact is that alot of people were called fear-mongerers when they opposed the long-term viability of the XFactor method and it’s POSSIBLE now that those people may have had a point.
Anyway, I’ll leave it at that.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
Hi All,
Some of you may find this interesting, it outlines an example on LSI. Its a little old however I think it attacks the LSI issue very well.
http://www.latentsemanticindexing.co.uk/14/simple-website-theme-structure-part-ii/
Some food for thought!
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
Just wanted to add something to the discussion: I have been on a massive backlinking campaign for some sites for the last couple of months, so have pretty much memorised page 1 for a few keywords. What I have noticed in the last few days is most sites on page 1 dancing wildly, where as previously they were fairly fixed. A lot of these are authority sites, and in some UK niches, I am up against well known national companies – they too are fluctuating in the rankings. I am monitoring these using various data centres and proxies. My point is, it is definitely not only micro sites that are affected.
That goes back to the SEOMoz video. Even they are taking hits on some of their deeper pages that were ranking for long tail terms.
Curious, the ones you are noticing where the large authority company sites are fluctuating, is it for their main terms, or some of their deeper pages that they were ranking for?
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
For the really big sites its sub pages, but there are also some well established medium sized sites where the home page is jumping around, in one case It seem to jump around between number 3 (the highest it has been) and number 13 (the lowest) currently it is sitting at 7. There are several other cases similar to this. They are professional well optimised corporate sites, although the page has relatively few backlinks – thats the only common factor (i would never have targetted the niche if they had lots of backlinks)
i think that whatever has changed, its more complex and sophisticated than we might be giving it credit for.
Interesting note: While Matt C.utts may have said that the long tail changes were in relation to this “Mayday” update, we were all wondering why our changes weren’t showing up until the last week or so. Well, it is possible that our changes may not be mayday related. They might just have something to do with Caffeine.
http://searchengineland.com/smx-video-googles-matt-cutts-on-caffeine-launch-43933
Search Engine Land has a new video up, interviewing Matt, where he says Google officially rolled out Caffeine within “the last few days”, stating that today it is officially rolled out and has processed all of their data servers.
Is it related? Am I crazy? Who knows! But, the timing on this is a bit interesting to say the least…
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
He mentions in the video that, not only are they now able to associate the link and it’s anchor text when indexing sites, but also lots of other information along with it. This is an interesting statement and i’m not exactly sure what it means yet, but I would say it may lend credence to the LSI argument, as well as, more weight to having links from sites with relevant content. Who knows, links from sites with relevant content with LSI keywords themselves might even be more valuable.
Suffice it to say, rolling out mayday and caffeine all at once was huge for our industry and this should be exciting to digest.
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
HI Mathew,
Good point, just ran a search and found this link, http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054
Apparently, Caffeine has nothing to do with the drop in rankings although I do have to agree with you on the timing. Maybe Google don’t know themselves…lol
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
I had actually read several articles where they claimed mayday effected long tails and caffeine had nothing to do with any changes.
That being said, I don’t buy half of what they say….
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
I agree with you on this, based on whats being said and what collectively our stats are telling us are contradicting each other. I’m still going to go along with what you’re saying Mathew. I still think Mayday WAS the cause of this.
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
Here’s hoping Sara makes a new post today, haha, I can’t even keep track of these threads anymore.. lol
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
Lol, exactly….its all gettging confusing now!
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
Fir those of you that saw a drop, have any of you seen any improvements in the last few days?
Nettech recently posted..The worst birthday ever and all because of Google’s Mayday Update
For me, my adsense income is very low and I have not seen it come back for the past week. Page impressions cut in half too. So traffic is lower. Some of my first page listings are gone – about 5 or so of them (exact keyword domain in positions 4-7), which seems to be the reason why low page impressions and low adsense. But I did a lot of backlinking prior to seeing this. I wonder if they are just doing the dance. They are sites about 6 months old. I’m thinking more traffic is needed so more linking is needed.
I’m seeing a few of our sites move back onto the first page by themselves. Haven’t touched them in a while (no additional backlinks either). Income is recovering too, I’m waiting to see what happens over the next few weeks.
One of my bigger authority sites has actually increased in revenue, and moved up closer to 1st as well. It didn’t seem to be affected by Mayday at all.
S recently posted..Recap for May 2010
Kinda late to your discussion here… but I too, had several sites affected by the “June 2nd” Mayday Update.
Due to the number and range of content, monetiziation and marketing, on the affected sites… I have found 2 very ominous trends, that actually have very little to do with my content… but moreso the way the content is displayed and linked to.
- Bounce rate
- Type of Backlinks
Bounce rates to formerly popular pages (hundreds of monthly visits from G) for specific longer-tail phrases are high (+75%)! In Analytics side by side comparisons… these high bounce phrases have disappeared from the current months traffic!
To me… one thing to check is high volume phrases, as they relate to bounce rate.
Again, since I have several sites to compare this with… I was able to rule out some common factors like adsense, certain niche markets, the CMS, etc.
The second most prevalent factor I see is the backlink profile. Sites with a high volume to blog comments and article directory marketing, seem to have suffered the most. (-90% of G referrals in some cases)
Anyhow… Love your content, found the site and subscribed!
Mark (aka) The Niche Store Builder
makes sense re: blog commenting being devalued.
On the bounce rate – its so easy to fake its not funny, so i cant see this ever being a ranking factor. I mean, if it was, someone would release a tool for $50 which basically visited your site and stayed there for 1 hour x 1,000,000 giving your a bounce rate of 0.1%.
All bounce rate is good for is tweaking your landing page.
Hey Dan –
Agree on the links.
I would think the bounce-rate however is very easy for G to measure and work with as a ranking factor.
Its my understanding that G considers ANY 1-page visit with an exit, as a bounce. Whether that user stayed and watched 59 minutes of videos or not… if they do nothing more to move throughout and interact with the site, G sees it as a bounce.
The algo is smart enough to know:
1 – User came from Google search
2 – User was human (Based on previous search habit and history)
3 – The length of time on the page
4 – Whether a user interacted with the content (even if it isn’t meant to be)
5 – So much more…
Now… surely there could be ways to pay people to search G, find a result, click it, and then navigate through the site… but I’m guessing it would need to be human with previous history also.
Mark – Niche Store Builder recently posted..Mayday Solution #1 – Start Fixing Bounce Rates!
It looks like I am not the only one that feels LSI words are the “meat and potatoes” to getting micro niche sites to stick on page 1. Check out this email from Dan Raine partnered up with Ed Dale for 30 day challenge (its a free course).
After reading this, I am even more certain this is why my sites fell and why my friend Jon’s and Steve’s (from xfactor’s forum) sites did not drop.
All I do when I write my content is make sure it reads like a human wrote it. I don’t even worry about how many times I used the main keyword.