Google Mayday Update – Why Quality Copy Has Suddenly Become So Important

Sure, it SOUNDS a little daunting—“Google Mayday,” as if somehow Google is about to hit a giant Internet iceberg and sink to the bottom of the Webby Sea. In reality, Google Mayday isn’t nearly that frightening—in fact, if you’re a smaller business owner looking to capitalize on the constantly changing world of SEO (In 2009 alone, Google switched things up with its organic search algorithms between 350 and 550 different ways), the Google Mayday update may prove extremely beneficial to your site’s traffic, especially if you put in the effort to provide higher quality content to your visitors.

The question remains, however—what exactly is this mysterious Google Mayday update? Well, as explained by Google’s Matt Cutts, Google Mayday is “an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries.” This indicates more of a change in the ranking system itself, and that these “long tail” searches allow smaller sites more opportunity to be found than shorter one or two word searches. Sites are still indexed, but some are just not ranking as high based on “quality” of their content. The sites that seem to have been most affected by Google Mayday are major ecommerce sites that, without individual links into their item pages and with those item pages traditionally buried within their structure, may be lacking in unique content.

Cutts suggested that if this was the case, site owners should re-evaluate what their site has to offer in regards to these long tail keywords and perhaps add or redesign in order to offer something new (think user reviews or fresh daily content) and provide visitors with more than just static information. Become KNOWN in the community you serve—you want your site to be the authority on the subject, not just another source of the same information searchers can find in a dozen other places. This also means that gone are the days of tossing in keywords willy-nilly just to up your SEO—Google Mayday’s focus on higher quality also means focusing on content that does more than simply drag traffic in to look at a set of buzzwords. Higher quality Web sites means just that—higher quality content, images, and writing are the new “keys” to snagging traffic, allowing new opportunity for the promotion of quality over quantity.