Ok, now I am seriously freaking out! I barely broke $11 yesterday and today is not looking any prettier.
SEOmoz has a good video explaining the Mayday update with some maybe useful tips to find out if your sites are being effected but the mayday update and where to go from here.
On another note I have to say WTH Google? Seriously!? So now having keywords in the URL are totally void as far as SEO is concerned?!?!
Look at this hubpage URL:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Simple-Solutions-To-Snoring
and yet look at the actual title for the Hubpage content itself, “Simple Solutions For Over Sweating”. Can you guess which keyword it is ranking for? Well it certainly is not ranking for “solutions to snoring” I can tell you that! Give up? Ok, its ranking for “over sweating”. So now apparently you can rank for a keyword based on H1 tags alone and not even need to have your actual keywords in the domain URL at all????
I think this example once again proves that Google feels content is king!
Oh noes! Now everyone is going to run to Hubpages and make a zillion hubpages because URL no longer plays a role in keyword domination anymore. Instead; all you need is the keyword in your H1 tag, a quick article with the keyword used a few times and 4 social bookmark back links. THEN; oh yes; THEN you too can have the #4 position for your keyword. I apologize for the sarcasm but I seriously am so frustrated right now!
Am I going to run out and waste my time and energy in making Hubpages (again)?? Hell no. Do I think Google will fix this algorithm indexing? I certainly hope so, otherwise it does prove that there is definite favoritism amongst authority sites.
Sorry people I just need to vent. I am not seeing any ranking changes in an upward trend. Then again, I stopped looking for my sites beyond page 10.
I’m pretty sure tomorrow’s focus and the days to come will be to add more content to my main pages. I’m gonna try and throw in some more LSI words to see if it helps any. We gotta just keep swimming. Take a deep breath and just keep swimming!
RSS Feeds
on 
on 
on 
on
Yeah –
So, in other words: at the very least adjust your H1-H6 tags in the near future, re-visit onpage SEO and then keep truckin’.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
Oh yea, I forgot to add the url doesn’t matter as long as its posted on an authority site! Definitely some authority site favoritism going on.
I know the feeling hun…..now approaching 48 hours without barely ANY sleep!…literally….for the first time in years I’ve just been walking up and down in my house not knowing what to do….its not a nice feeling being comepltely lost! Thanks for the video….Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
I just realised that I saw that video yesterday…lol
Heres something that may be of interest
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,693,813.PN.&OS=pn/7,693,813&RS=PN/7,693,813
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
I dont know what to make of this. My rankings are unaffected, but my income is down massively. I had a good look and I have lost about 20% of my traffic
but my main longtail keywords are unaffected. I must have lost the random long longtail (if that makes sense) traffic. What is stranger is that my EPC seems to be down about 50%..
Maybe the game is up? Time to just focus on a couple of large authority sites? Put all our effort into adding content and backlinks to one domain?
Either way, I am now convinced, adsense sucks!!
I lost about 20% of my traffic as well, and am definitely not getting random long tail search traffic as much. I also noticed a huge decline in my EPC for the past three days. However, today my earnings are back to normal (although my traffic still a little low). I’m wondering if maybe some advertisers put their campaigns on hold while trying to sort things out?
Michelle recently posted..Mayday and Monthly Goals Updates
I think that’s the case Michelle. Especially since the authority sites are now ranking easier for long tail keywords in which they once upon a time would spend advertising fees on. So now they are either bidding extremely low or not even bidding at all.
Now that would make sense….
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
This definitely has affected a lot of people but I did read somewhere from Matt Cutts that said they had no intention of rolling back the changes or making any changes to them so don’t get your hopes up there.
Mike Roosa recently posted..Been A Strange Week
Yep, thats what the scary thing is. If you read Sara’s previous post, you’ll be able to see the MC video in question!
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
So far the changes have effected me in weird ways. My CTR is a lot higher, so I’m actually making more money(which is hopefully not a fluke), but my traffic has fell by 40%.
When I first heard about this I thought it would make my hubpages and infobarrels do a lot better but they have also fell in traffic.
What really confuses me is that this update is that it doesn’t seem to actually make it easier to find things on google.
lol. Google is now punishing internet marketers.
But this now explains why 1 hubpage I made last week is getting a lot of traffic. The hub is on a hot product.
But hubpages such. My hubpage got about 350 visitors, but barely made $3. I have a site on that same product. The day I had 300 visits, I made $11, and some amazon commision about $4. I think mayday affected the site because the site is only 3 weeks old.
First, sorry to hear you’re having some not so good days. I’ve just been a reader for a short while, but almost immediately something that you’re doing, to me, raised a flag. Your backlinks. Google cares and weighs so much emphasis on quality back links. When I read that you’re putting up 400 backlinks in a few weeks or a month, I can tell it’s just basically link spam, because unless you’re a sensation site (e.g. chatroulette, etc) you’d never get that many back links in a short period without buying them or “cheating.” Especially when you get 400, then the next month a quarter of that. Also, no site is going to have 400 backlinks right away, especially when their site is getting 25 uniques a day or 100 uniques a day. You need the traffic in order to justify the backlinks. Google can see right through this. Using forum profiles, or linking from sites that are known link farms, well, eventually you’re going to get penalized. Looks like this update may have done that. You need links from quality, relevant sites. Sorry, this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s what I think may have happened with your sites.
That makes sense – but I’ve done the same experiment and saw only upward mobility. My two sites I used for this same experiment both jumped upward.
One of my sites jumped up about 70 spots, in fact. My other site crawled up to number one, but started out at #7, no biggie…
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
Its not my backlinking structure. I have IM friends that have used Blog Blueprint, UAW and forum profile backlinks just as I have and their sites are not affected.
Sure, its possible that the backlinks or lack thereof can be the culprit but that would not explain why my authority site project I was working on that had 10 pages of new content added with a new ezine article to back link each inner page also disappeared in the SERPs.
As far as the 400 back links go. The 400 were not built in one day nor are they going to be indexed in one day. Secondly; all 400 backlinks are not pointing to the main page. They are being distributed amongst 5 pages of my site so its actually less than 100 backlinks to each page. As of right now in YSE, the site has about 40 profile backlinks pointing to the main page. That’s not bad for a period of 2 weeks. That’s nothing for Google to freak out about. And finally; there is no way Google would have decided to punish the majority of my sites because they didn’t seem to like where my back links were coming from. Sure, I might be penalized because I do not have enough high quality back links but I am not convinced that using blog blueprint or forum profile backlinks is the issue. Especially considering I have only used forum profile backlinks on a small handful of my micro niche sites so forum profile backlinking is not part of my norm for backlinking my niche sites.
But if you are skeptical of forum profile backlinking, I am sure you will find Tom Goodwin’s response on the warrior forum about his sites to be interesting. Tom and Terry run the Backlink Blackbelt forum profile packets and so they practice forum backlinking almost exclusively on their sites. Tom announced that his sites have not been affected in the SERPs.
Sorry, I do not mean to come off defensive but I just wanted to make things clear that my linking isn’t shady or blackhat and they are certainly not spammy. In fact, my sites that are unchanged in their positions posses these same forms of link building practices.
I don’t think this is a numbers game as far as the actual backlinks a site needs in order to rank either. I just had a site move from #11 yesterday to #8 today and it only has 17 back links, all coming from link exchanges, no blog blueprint runs, no UAW runs and no forum profile backlinks. This site has 8 pages of content.
Another site that moved up one position as of yesterday on page 1, has similar back links only it also has some Blog Blueprint backlinks. It has 44 backlinks. This site has 5 pages of content.
The thing these two sites have in common is that they are both Thesis themes. I know theme should have nothing to do with rankings but I’m just sayin’.
Wow, this is a really long response. Sorry about that.
And by all means, I am not trying to rant at you or anything and I apologize if it seems I am. I’m just freaking out. I have been on edge the past 2 weeks and then this mayday update hit me a few days ago.
Hi Jackson, I really hope that it is that simple but I think that there is more then meets the eye. Anyway the forum profile linking argument had been around for ages. Whether is it natural or non natural linking activities, most micro niche sites still drops like hot potatoes. Furthermore, Sara’s site you mentioned is or if not the only site that she experiment in profile links.
Tinman recently posted..Day 66 – Ploughing On After G Mayday Aftermath
Be careful with jumping to quick conclusions without carefully studying the data. We at BacklinksPhilippines did a parallel live experiment with “James the JustOn Elance” and you can read it on:
http://theaveragegenius.net/got-backlinks-my-backlinks-philippines-results/
His site has improved in rankings and it is still there moving up and down in the Top 3.
We used almost the same profile backlinks for Sara’s and James’s sites. And the same profile backlinks we used for Sara’s and James’s are the same profile backlinks we used to backlink my personal article:
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1807955
Type “how to win your ex back” without the quotes and you will see that the above article is ranking No. 1 for Google US. And that said article has been getting more than a thousand profile backlinks and it is still there. The backlinks for that article is almost exclusively (95%++) profile backlinks.
If you read Mike Iser’s blog at http://www.mikeiser.com, he also reported a drastic drop in income level, (same with Sara) and we did not do backlinks to any of Mike Iser’s site nor he is a fan of profile backlinking. And there are thousand of people out there who have not done profile backlinks and who are also reporting drastic drops in incomes. Try Googling “Google MayDay Update” and you will see that thousands of webmasters are reporting drastic drops in incomes and traffic especially from long tail traffic.
You must also remember that we are doing backlinks to just 1 of the many sites of Sara’s and Sara seems to be reporting drops even to those sites which did not receive even a single backlink from us.
John D.
I’ll have to back that up, John’s team did what they set out to do, so, sorry, Jackson – you jumped the gun based on speculation.
Before you bury Sara’s experiments or mine with BLP, I’d double-check what you’re talking about.
My “worst” site (which I think was shot down because Digg didn’t like my one lousy Digg on that site…someone reported me for it or what not: Digg kicked me off their server…because – SIX Diggs is “spam”…across 6 sites no less…), went from 196 -> 125, which is a jump of 71 in SERPs.
My other site is resting at around spot #3-5, floating thereabout, up from spot #7.
So just for the record, I’d vouch for what BLP has done.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
and no…still not an affiliate w/them! ((hint hint, John!!))
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
Hi Jackson,
I think this is just speculation without any proof. Ive got to also support John from BLP and the others as I’ve experienced drops from sites that I had profile backlinks from and those with NONE whatsoever. Profile backlinks maybe just 1 piece of a huge jigsaw of ranking factors. This update focusses primarily long-tail keywords, quality on page SEO and content with a added bit of ‘authority’.
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
Of course I’m speculating. Without working for Google, that’s all ANYONE can do is speculate. All I said was “you MAY be getting penalized for having poor quality links.” I’m not knocking anyone’s business or methods. It’s merely something that MAY be having an affect. Do what you want, that’s entirely up to the user. I am not seeing any fluctuation right now between my network. My sites combined receive almost 25K uniques per DAY. That’s a lot of data that I am able to analyze.
To those who don’t think buying links or services is blackhat, you’re wrong. That’s exactly what it is lol. In fact ALL seo is blackhat, because you’re manipulating something to make your rankings increase. I do it all the time, but I know it’s blackhat and I’m not in denial over it. WhiteHat is getting everything organically. That means you don’t signup for link services, you don’t buy links, you don’t do any of that.
Sorry to get everyone all worked up lol. I didn’t mean any harm. I just was pointing something out that MAY have an affect that I could see. It may not too and it could be something entirely differently. Without even seeing Sara’s sites, it’s impossible for anyone but Sara, Google and God to know what’s going on lol.
Jackson,
Sorry I hope I didn’t offend you and I didn’t mean it to come across in a negative way. I was also just merely pointing what I’ve noticed from the data that I have as well…lol
We’re def on the same side here, however we also need a little bit of divine intervention to help us through this rather tough time…lol
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
And things continue to get goofier each day. So one site that dropped off the face of the earth still isn’t ranking for the main keyword and yet an inner page is showing up listed on page 10. This is just nuts. That inner page only has 1 word in common with my main keyword.
so i just checked an exact match domain i regged 2 weeks ago. It has one page of content, and about 10 backlinks. First page is full of e commerce pr 4′s…. (nextag, amazon etc) 10k exact searches per month…. Im in position 11…. hmmmmm
I don’t think PR has anything to do with the rankings either. For one of my sites’ keywords the #1 position is held by a PR1 and there are only 2 higher PR sites on page one. They are both PR3 and they are not dominating the first 5 positions even.
Sorry, Sara. I am sure this is the last thing you need right now with all the other issues you have been dealing with. Hang tight, hopefully things will rebound. If not, you’ll adapt. You made it this far.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
This is certainly not good news and I’ve suffered a hit with my Micro Niche sites as well.
Hi Nathanm
How bad were your earnings and rankings?
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
So if the big change was between late April to Mid-May, how come the hammer seems to have fallen on the first week of June?
That’s a really good question that I would love to know the answer to as well. I had a pretty decent adsense month for May. I did not increase my earnings by $100-200 more like I had hoped to do. But at least it was consistent. I don’t know why my sites were unaltered in May and took the hit last week.
I think it took this long to hit the majority of people-there are billions of websites out, and more people are probably gonna be affected down the road!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
Somewhere on the webmaster forum someone said something went into effect late last week regarding a new database change with Google. Wish I could find that post now, but can’t. I believe it was by Tedster…
Michelle recently posted..Mayday and Monthly Goals Updates
Are you actually losing a percentage of traffic that is effecting your earnings?
Have you verified that you lost long tail searches?
Or could this just be an adsense thing at the moment?
The reason I ask is because I just checked all my Xfactor type sites that I have made and I don’t have any change in the traffic between April 1st till today.
I’ve logged into Google Analytics’s and all I saw was a sharp drop right down to 2-3 hits and now 0 hits per day… definitely a rankings drop. To back this up, rankings have also been checked and they confirm that all traffic has gone!
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
Yea I just looked at a site that is even sitting at #8 and its dropped to 0 hits per day.
Losing long tail traffic does not mean that your traffic goes to 0.
The video said 5-15% in long tail traffic. It’s not saying that your traffic will be completely gone.
I don’t know where they got those figures from but if you have a micro niche site, ALL of your initial keywords are generally long-tail hence the drop to literally nada!
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
I would say I have lost at least 20% of my traffic and according to yesterday; I have also lost 1/2 of my page impressions. I have also lost 100% traffic on a few sites.
And just an example, on one site I had 37 different long tails I was getting traffic from in May and so far in June I have only 2 different long tails showing up. I know its only the first week of June but to even match last months keywords long tails, I should have already had 7-10 different ones showing up.
Oh no, you said “just keep swimming”. I thought you said “just keep spinning” so I spent the last hour spinning an article. I need to pay better attention.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
lol
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
You made me giggle!
NICE one xD
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
Just some anecdotal evidence for you folks….
I have been reading up on IM since mid April and decided to jump in.
I have 5 CB Snipers set up using the GS blueprint by George Brown (that have never earned a penny) and a few other sites I set up using SEO tactics learned while reading from all you clever people that do contain affiliate links and adsense, though I created them following no specific blueprint.
So it looks like I created them all just as the change was happening. My longest tail kw is 6 words (do “to” and “the” count as words?) and ranks at 48 on google with zero backlinks. My other CB snipers are 2-3 words and have stayed solid on pages 1 or 2 with less than 30 backlinks.
I was just about to drop $500 on the xfactor book, mnf, BMD, and some other stuff but am holding off until things straighten out a bit.
You know, before you drop all that on those resources (with the exception of John’s book – it’s exceptional, but hold off as he’s updating), you can do all that for free…
Social bookmark with PingFm or OnlyWire
Find keywords with a free guide like at FlippaChick dot com (it’s good stuff) — I wish I had that earlier on
Article marketing is free, so are press releases (you can publish right to the web a Press Release via Google Docs…good template, too)
Etc. All the tools are meant to automate what you do manually, so you should keep moving forward but just find cheaper ways to do it all.
Just my 2 cents (it’s how I got started before the technical short cuts)
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
I agree with James. You don’t “need” MNF to conduct keyword research. you can do your keyword research with just the google adwords keyword tool and then confirming the estimated CPC on your words using spyfu.com. MNF just makes it easier for me to conduct my research, get an estimation of CPC and find out if those domains are available all with just one piece of software.
Bookmarking Demon is great no matter which method you choose to build your internet marketing presence. No matter how you go about building sites you will need backlinks and BMD can help you get some backlinks and help with getting pages/sites indexed quicker. Again, this is not a must have tool. you can social bookmark by hand for free using something like socialmarker.com. I just prefer a set and forget option for this and BMD delivers full automation.
Thanks James, just had my eyes glued to FC website for the past hour. She writes so well! I will read the ebook tonight.
onlywire looks great and at a great price. is this truly an alternative to bmd?
also, any idea when a new rev of the xfactor book is due?
Thanks again!
Google snipping has always done well for me as far as ranking. Each google sniper site I ever built, ranked within the first 5 positions immediately and have either held their top positions or have ranked to #1 after the Mayday Update.
Some people on John’s (xfactor) forum are reporting that their older sites have also been changed so this truly is not an aged domain issue. But why would all 3 of my Google Sniper sites be unchanged?
They are all 3 keyword phrased domains and they all have a minimum of 3 posts and one of the sites actually has about 6 pages of content, so they are basically thin sites. They are all physical product based sites (I don’t do clickbank products with them) The only thing I can fathom is that the sites were built with LSI words in mind. Hence why George has you making posts with certain keywords in the order that he teaches. There is much validity to his concept.
As I said, I’ve only just started and have only a handful of sites, but I do cram the LSI keywords in there like mad and it seems to help.
how is today looking everyone?
I don’t wanna talk about it. *pouts* haha!
I am just trying to focus on not worrying about this anymore. At least for today… Worrying is preventing me from being productive so for now I am gonna tweak some main page content. I am going to take a look at the new ranking competitors on my keywords and see what sort of LSI they are using in their content.
Actually, up and down. My ‘XFactor’ niche sites are still the same as yesterday but somethign strange has happened, some of my recent 1 page sites which have VERY good content seem to be getting clicks.
I’ve actually made a £1 more than I did in the whole of yesterday which is good but still very very low earnings. All my ‘older’ sites seem to be drip-feeding me a few pennies here and there. I think they’ve actually increased….hmmmmmm…
The more I look at it, the more I think Google has DEFINATELY good some kind of favorutism towards older sites. These sites that are 1 pagers have been updated recently but have had them registered like over 2 years ago……strange huh?!!!!!!
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
Age definitely seems to play a factor. I have several authority sites that I made when I first started years ago, these are all clickbank affiliate pages, and they haven’t budged a wink.
As a matter of fact, as some of the long tail domain keyword oriented sites catapulted to oblivion, I think I actually improved my rankings in some cases.
So far, from my data, it looks like the Keyword as Domain bump is null and void now, which would probably account for a major part of the decrease in many peoples rankings. One key aspect of the Micro Niche model was utilizing the outrageous bump Google gave for keyword domains.
To me, this just leads me to believe that we can start doing more legitimate business rather than chasing these models like Johns.
Buy a kewl domain like KeywordUltra.com, build 20 pages of supremely good content, then deep link everything and mash it all up.
I think going forward, this business model actually looks solid going forward. Link quantity, quality, and content quality are going to be the driving factors. Which, to be honest, were always the key principles of internet marketing, until someone stumbled on the Google long tail backdoor.
I think aged 2+ year old domains just got more valuable…
Matthew DC recently posted..Earnings Update
Totally agree on this point.
I’m actually seeing a rise in traffic on my older domains which I thought would never rank.
I’ve got lots of old domains which I’ve never used like over 5+ years which I may just build into something. I agree that they’ve just got valubale, its more of a level playing field and each site can get ranked on its merits rather than the fact that it is a keyword rich domain (DAMN!..lol).
It does seem to be good for the user’s perspective but just means us IMers will have to adapt. After all Google is all about the user’s experience which is why they’ve made soo much money!
Oh well….
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
This would make sense, that Google may have removed the advantage of a kw-only domain. Now the question is, are the Xfactor-like sites that were ranking well without backlinks the ones that have disappeared while the sites that were backlinked and SEO’d well (in addition to the kw-only domain) are keeping their rankings?
Actually, now that I think about it, I have a kw-only domain that has very few BLs that is still ranking well. But maybe the competition is all also weak. There are probably a few variables that changed with this update so it will be difficult to pinpoint exactly what is in play for a particular site.
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
Any of you that are complete drop sin traffic, are you getting any other organic traffic from Yahoo, Bing, Ask etc?
I’m beginning to get only 1 or 2 clicks here and there which is a start but still seeing nothing in terms of increases in rank…still holding out now for a couple of days and focussing on other things!!!!!
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
Lol, awwww, well at least you did something positive
I think this is just speculation without any proof. Ive got to also support John from BLP and the others as I’ve experienced drops from sites that I had profile backlinks from and those with NONE whatsoever. Profile backlinks maybe just 1 piece of a huge jigsaw of ranking factors.