Never Underestimate The Real Power Of Long-Tail Keywords
Hunter Waterhouse
A Free-Reprint Article Written by: Hunter Waterhouse
Article Title:
Never Underestimate The Real Power Of Long-Tail Keywords
See TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article.
Article Description:
The Mayday Update was primarily focused on changing how
Long-Tail Search Queries were handled by Google... In this
article, I discuss what Mayday changed, and how to optimize
for the new Google...
Additional Article Information:
===============================
1373 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line
Distribution Date and Time: 2010-06-23 09:00:00
Written By: Hunter Waterhouse
Copyright: 2010
Contact Email: mailto:hunter.w...@thephantomwriters.com
For more free-reprint articles by Hunter Waterhouse, please visit:
http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/hunter-waterhouse.html
=============================================
Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters:
=============================================
HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste
Versions Of Article Are Available at:
http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/w/long-tail-keywords.shtml#get_code
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Never Underestimate The Real Power Of Long-Tail Keywords
Copyright (c) 2010 Hunter Waterhouse
Popular Marketers
http://www.popularmarketers.com/
Before 2010, May Day simply referred to May 1st, a celebration of
the beginning of Spring, or International Workers' Day (Labour
Day), as practiced in many countries, most notably in Russia...
The alternate spelling Mayday was a signal used by ships'
captains and airplane pilots to announce "Come and Help me!",
as derived from the French word, "m'aidez"...
Google's Mayday Update
Beginning in May 2010, Mayday became the code word for a major
ranking change in Google and new attacks of "Google paranoia"
by webmasters everywhere...
As webmasters, we should leave the paranoia to those who truly
have a reason to be paranoid, like my ex-wife and her family. ;-)
Google has always advised that we, as webmasters, should focus on
giving searchers what they are trying to give Google's search
users: the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers.
As for myself, many of the new ranking factors included in the
Mayday Update are things that I have expected the engineers at
Google to include for a long time...
Call me strange if you will -- my ex-wife and her family do --
but I have always tried to plan my website optimization based on
what I thought Google should have been doing already...
So, when Mayday finally came, I was ready...
Unlike many of my peers, I was not crying in my beer in the
aftermath of Google's Mayday Update...
About The Mayday Algorithm Update
An article on Search Engine Guide (http://bit.ly/8ZQ9yL), about
Google's May Day Update, suggested that Matt Cutts, of Google�s
Webspam Team, said at Google I/O 2010, �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.�
So if your website was hurt by the Mayday Update, you should pay
attention to this article, because "the way things were" is
gone forever...
Vanessa Fox, formerly of Google, in another article at Search
Engine Land (http://selnd.com/bOqqcE) suggested that the update
primarily affected e-commerce websites that rely upon a product
manufacturer's product description... In other words, if a
webmaster uses the default product description given by the
original product manufacturer, then the product sales page will
have taken a hit in Google's search listings...
Fox also said, "Before, pages that didn�t have high quality
signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals.
And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don�t have as much
weight in ranking if the page doesn�t have the right quality
signals."
It seems that a lot of webmasters dismissed Fox' view as just
plain wrong, but I side with Dave Davis, who said, "I believe
she was right on the money." (http://bit.ly/b4sGKy)
As the questions about Google's Mayday Update spiraled, Matt
Cutts did a video for the Google Webmaster Central Channel at
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp), about
the Mayday Update (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM).
In that video, Cutts emphasized that Mayday is only one of more
than 400 tweaks that Google does to its algorithms each year, and
he further emphasized that Mayday has been fully tested and is a
permanent change to Google's search algorithms.
What Mayday Means For Google Search
The Mayday Update was primarily focused on changing how Long-Tail
Keywords were handled by Google's search engine...
To make sure that you and I are on the same page, Long-Tail
Keywords are those search phrases that contain more than 3 words.
For example, as I was researching this article, my search query
at Google was: "Google long tail keywords mayday".
My five-word search query is a great example of Long-Tailed
Keywords.
In the Matt Cutts' video shown above, Cutts defined Long Tail
Search Queries in contrast to Head Search Queries, with Head
Queries being the one-, two- and three-word search phrases.
I found it odd that an article at Small Business Computing
(http://bit.ly/bkOXqQ) suggested that this Google algorithm
update was simply a reflection of the changing habits of search
engine users, who employ more long-tail keywords in their
searches today, than they had in previous years...
To be honest, I find it hard to believe that long-tail search
queries is a new trend... I suspect that the truth is that Google
finally acknowledged the importance of long-tail search
queries... And in doing so, they fixed their weakness in that
area...
Long-Tail Search Queries Were The Red-Headed Stepchild of Google
Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google,
announced at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto 2010
conference, "For long-tail queries, we now just consider them as
all other queries and place as much value on them as we do into
shorter queries."
Myself, I am blown away by that statement...
Okay... Let's see if you and I see the same message here...
Until the Mayday Update, Google had always treated long-tail
queries with a different algorithm than "head of demand"
queries (1-3 word queries)?
And now, Google is treating both with the same algorithm?
No wonder I was never satisfied with long-tail search queries at
Google... No wonder I had been looking elsewhere for some of my
search results... Google was using two algorithms, and most of my
search habits were met with their other not-as-good search
algorithm...
Digging Deeper Into Mayday Update
I came across the May 11th edition of the Search Engine Facts
newsletter (http://bit.ly/9V4Fyv). The newsletter stated, "It
seems that this is not a penalty but a change in Google's
ranking algorithm. Google might now be able to index longer
keyword phrases more accurately. There's a new Google patent
that deals with this topic." (United States Patent #7693813:
http://bit.ly/98cLlc )
So the story is becoming a bit more clear... Before Caffeine,
then Mayday, Google did a poor job with long-tail keywords,
because its main algorithm did a poor job with long-tail
keywords...
Mayday Winners And Losers
Around April 28th-May 3rd a lot of sites (SEOmoz.org included)
noticed a sudden loss of 5-15% of their normal long tail traffic
(http://bit.ly/amEcjY). Some e-commerce websites reported losses
as high as 90% of its global traffic.
But by the end of May 3rd, there were still ten listings on page
one of Google, so for every website that lost, someone else
picked up new visitors.
My websites picked up around 10% across the board... However, I
was not among Maydays' biggest winners...
Earlier in this article, I mentioned Dave Davis, who is the
Managing Director of http://www.RedFlyMarketing.com/
On the RedFly Marketing blog, Davis said, "We have concrete
Google Analytics evidence that shows 30-60% increases in traffic
to some of our and our clients sites just before and after May.
It is important to note that these sites are all eCommerce and
forum sites that had a steady flow of long tail traffic and now
have a much greater share of this traffic. All this traffic
increase is from Google search term referrals with a word length
of 4 or over." (http://bit.ly/b4sGKy)
Davis suggested that a lot of AdWords advertisers, managers and
experts saw these changes coming long ago...
Sadly though, a lot of webmasters are still waiting for Google to
fix its' mistake... Those folks might just be the May Flies of
the Internet --- here today, gone forever...
Conclusions To Be Drawn From Mayday
Davis said, "The majority of those complaining (about Mayday)
have relied too much on domain authority and internal linking...
Google is now seeing individual documents as their own entities a
lot more."
I agree... I have been preaching the value of Deep Links --
inbound links to pages deep within your website -- for a long
time... As a result of my practicing what I preach, I am one of
the Mayday winners...
Before the Mayday Update, you could build links exclusively to
your domains' home page, and use internal linking to support the
rankings of your internal pages... But that was yesterday's
Google... That strategy will never work again...
Returning to Maile Ohye's comment, one more important
distinction can be drawn...
If you have come to understand how to rank your website for Head
Queries, then you already have the knowledge of how to rank your
website for Long-Tail Queries... You simply have to take that
knowledge you already possess, and apply it to your website, one
page at a time...
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Try the Popular Marketers Free Long-Tail Keyword Research Tool
here: http://www.popularmarketers.com/long-tail-keywords.php
Get your free profile page at http://www.PopularMarketers.com/
and consider one of our Premium Membership packages, designed to
help marketers sell more products and services... Learn more at:
http://www.PopularMarketers.com/ Written by: Hunter Waterhouse
--- END ARTICLE ---
Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at:
http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/w/long-tail-keywords.shtml#get_code
.....................................
TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules
(Last Updated: May 11, 2006)
Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of:
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR:
.....................................
*** Digital Reprint Rights ***
* If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog,
You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body
of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as
Hyperlinks (clickable links).
* Links must remain in the form that we published them.
Clean links should point to the Author's links without
redirects having been inserted into the copy.
* You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or
Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks
must be retained with articles. You can change where
the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all
paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do.
* Email Distribution of this article Must be done through
Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email.
* You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for
proper display of the article in your website or in your
ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests
within the article.
* You may not use sentences from this article as an input
for any software that steals sentences from others in
order to build an article with software. The copyright on
this article applies to the "WHOLE" article.
*** Author Notification ***
We ask that you notify the author of publication of his
or her work. Hunter Waterhouse can be reached at:
hunter.w...@thephantomwriters.com
*** Print Publication Reprint Rights ***
If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT
publication, you must contact the author directly
for Print Permission at:
mailto:hunter.w...@thephantomwriters.com
.....................................
If you need help converting this text article for proper
hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this
free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl
Would you like to learn how to improve the performance of your
article marketing campaigns? Download our F.R.E.E. 108-page
Article Marketing Ebook at:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html
*****************************************************************
*
* This email is being delivered directly to members of the group:
*
* Spider-Sear...@googlegroups.com
*
*****************************************************************
=====================================================================
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION
http://thePhantomWriters.com/ is a paid article distribution
service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com
are owned and operated by:
Bill Platt
3010 E Raintree
Stillwater, Oklahoma USA 74074
Learn more about our article distribution services by visiting:
http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/article-distribution/index.html
The content of this article is solely the property
and opinion of its author, Hunter Waterhouse
http://www.popularmarketers.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
---------------------------------------------------------------------