Google Mayday Update, Caffeine and Tanked SERP Ranks

Posted by JR in Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Well looks like Google is at it again, making changes to their algorithm, shaking things up and causing webmasters to pull their hair out. Two things have happened in the last few weeks, Google launched the Caffeine update which they have been working on for some time and also there is what is being called the Mayday update. (By the way, this is a typical action on the part of Google, they usually make major tweaks in the summer time, around May and June). These are two very distinct actions on the part of Google.

Caffeine
Caffeine has nothing to do with ranking, it is just the method in which data is being stored, retrieved from keyword searches and then displayed in SERPS.

Mayday
Mayday IS about ranking and is a search quality algorithm change, ( not manual) launched by the Google Search Quality team and impacts long tail traffic referrals that DOES change how sites are ranked in SERPS.

Basically if your long tail traffic referrals fell heavily in the SERPS, Google is telling you your site sucks….Thanks Google, we love you too!

Last week at Google I/O, Matt Cutts said – ”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.”

Check out the video regarding Mayday by Matt Cutts

MAYDAY and GETTING SENT TO THE GOOGLE BLACK HOLE

Mayday has significantly impacted long tail keyword searches and therefore, inner pages as opposed to having a widespread affect on home pages and many have lost their precious rankings for these queries in SERPS.

There has also been a lot of buzz about the especially negative affects of Mayday on e-commerce sites ( that link offers some real useable insight into the e-commerce issues with Mayday, thanks to Link Builder) losing rankings and SERP placements that have significantly impacted their earnings and bottom line.

Mayday Impacts

1. Pages in long tail keyword searches that do not have healthy link profiles and so do not hold enough “authority” in the eyes of Google

2. Thin pages, like product pages without any other significant added value

3. Pages that are several clicks away from the home page, hence ineffective heirarchy and overall site navigation

4. New and much stricter guidelines have been set by Google as to what qualifies as an “authority” and “useful” site for a particular search query and only those sites that do will now rank for those terms.

5. Likely most thin affiliate sites pages went down hard.

6. Evidently the long tail pages that got hit were ones without significant amounts of written original content, hence the product pages of ecommerce sites, that only had product listings.

7. The long tail search referrals were tweaked to impact sites lacking authority in Google’s eyes.

8. This is not a manual penalty – purely algorithmic

9. Metrics measuring the “quality” and “authority” of sites has been tweaked, tested and launched and this is a permanent change.

10. Has nothing to do with Caffeine

Now What?

Likely many of you have been impacted by this, and if you haven’t yet done so, I suggest you go and check your sites rankings and see what’s going on.

At this point it is imperative to think quality and get creative.

Analyze everything about your sites and evaluate if your content really measures up to getting better links.

Look at your navigation – all inner pages need to be 2 or less clicks away from the home page.

Check your site structure – hierarchy always matters, make sure it’s clear and well balanced.

Bounce Rate – While Google denies this is a deciding factor – I’m not sure, if your site has a high bounce rate then that is a problem, and Google aside, you want to improve your user’s experience so they stay longer.

Check your website speed and fix any issues – See Complete Guide To Website Speed

Most Important

Take a look at those site that ARE ranking for the search queries you lost, use Link Diagnosis and take a look at their links. Their site structure, their content. What are they doing that you’re not?

Healthy link profiles to ALL pages of the site, not just home page, are significant for ranking.

Build authority – most important – authority is still gaged by a healthy link profile, I don’ t believe that has changed. Quality, natural, diverse links going to all pages of your site establish authority, when your site has high overall authority, inner pages will usually rank and rank quickly for most any search terms. If your long tail search traffic is suffering, get better links to those pages.

Don’t give up – like anything else in the world of Internet Marketing, this is a learning experience, and another opportunity to push your business and skill level to another level. Do the requisite research and then take action!

I have a lot of sites, and a few were affected by Mayday, which of course means loss of traffic, and therefore money. For me, I see one common denominator, the sites that suffered were not authority sites in the eyes of Google, which I already knew but it has never been a problem before. And, good quality links to those sites were few and far between.

LEARN MORE WITH PART 2 - How To Create and Rank Inner Website Pages Post Mayday

More Useful Stuff on Mayday

Mayday Thread at Webmaster World Forum – Good discussion going on here with all the techies and veteran webmasters who have lived through many Google shake ups.

Search Engine Land on Mayday

Why Google is Costing Some Sites

Was the Google Update a Complete Failure?

SEO Moz – Google Mayday Update and What it Means For You

How did you guys do? Anyone lost rankings? What are you doing about it?

40 Comments

Make Money Online With Adsense Properly – Google Banning Many Websites

Posted by JR in Affiliate Programs, Affiliate/Ad Networks, Google, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, Monetization, Webmaster/Website Optimization

It looks like Google is on the lookout and actively banning MFA sites.

What is MFA

MFA stands for “Made for Adsense Sites.” And these are sites created for the sole purpose of making money with Adsense.

Some of them are mediocre at best using half – assed regurgitated content from the web, republished articles from Ezine and other sites and some of them are really crappy where the ads themselves are placed in such a way that they overlap over the site’s written content, these are really bad.

They offer no real original quality or information.

Some have 5 pages of content, and some may have hundreds, but the content is poor, and the MFA quality is very evident.

The Banning of MFA’s

There has been quite a bit of buzz of late that many Blogger blogs that were MFA’s have been getting completely deleted by Google and the Adsense accounts associated with those getting banned as well, or if the sites were self hosted there has been a a complete deindexing of these websites from the SERPS.

Best case scenario is some Adsense accounts were not completely banned, but the sites were from the index.

This recent rash of deindexing of MFA sites and bans all seem to come from a particular network of bloggers that followed an MFA model that was widely taught and blogged about on some popular make money online blogs. Many of these sites even used the exact same “minimalist” blog theme, Blogger blogs and duplicate layouts.

The end result is that only did the weak MFA sites get hit, so did some of the MMO bloggers that were blogging about these kinds of techniques got hit with some sort of penalty as well.

In reality, the “get rich quick” and the “easy” ways to make money online for beginners are very attractive to most newbies, and so of course, many jumped on the MFA bandwagon, which in turn attracted the attention of Google.

I don’t really want to get into the who’s and what’s, as the purpose of this post is not that, but to warn all of you to not waste time building crappy sites for the purpose of making money with Google Adsense.

Make Money Online with Adsense Properly and 6 Valuable Lessons We Can All Learn From This

1. Don’t Make Google Look Stupid

Look, it’s simple, monopoly or not, like it or not, Google is the cornerstone of any online business, they can make or break you, so play by their rules and follow their webmaster guidelines- it’s really that simple!

Google’s rules are really not so bad, all they want is quality for their customers the searcher, and if they are gonna pay you money for clicks then they have a right to dictate the kind of sites those ads are placed. Most any valuable ad network actually monitors and evaluates websites where their advertisers ads will be placed.

Google, has, does and always will protect their interests and market share as they should, and if you think they don’t monitor the popular MMO and IM blogs to see what kind of teachings and information is being spread then you live under a rock.

2. Use Adsense Wisely

Adsense can be a great income stream when used properly. It should be used to compliment the website as just one revenue stream, it should not be sole purpose of building the website, this is the hallmark of MFA’s.

This is actually true for any affiliate site as well, there has to be value for the traffic over and above the ads and affiliate links or else these type of thin affiliate sites will suffer in the Google SERPS or possibly get completely deindexed all together.

3. Don’t Waste Time

Don’t waste valuable time launching 100 crappy sites sites just to make money with Adsense. Provide value and quality to users and build good sites that will bring long term revenue and a solid business model that doesn’t possess the risk of getting banned and wasting months of hard work.

4. There are NO Real Long Term Get Rich Quick and Easy Schemes Online

This business takes work and a lot of it in order to see long term and permanent results of your labors. Taking shortcuts that can get you banned are never wise choices, they may work for a little while or even some time, but eventually they only lead to problems.

In reality, in the world of Internet Marketing and Making Money Online you get back what you put in, and while building 100 MFA sites with crappy links and no quality may take some work, it doesn’t compare to the real work of building quality sites that endure and bring revenue for years to come.

5. How To Get Your Sites Banned

If you really want to get your websites banned, then build a site that uses the same theme, republish a few articles on it from Ezine or Article Dashboard, add some Adsense ads and place them in a way that they overlap and block your site’s content: rinse and repeat a lot of times over and I guarantee that you will get your sites banned very quickly .

6. Learn From Others – Don’t Make the Same Mistakes Yourself

I am now going to refer you to a very educational and comprehensive post from Ben, one blogger who was hit very hard with this Google MFA banning – I’ve had my last 4 months of work knocked out in an instant by Google – hundreds of sites completely deindexed last week .

It is a 4000 word synopsis on how NOT to make money online in 2010 and really hits home about the experiences of someone who within a day of reaching the $100 a day Adsense revenue mark had all his Adsense sites deindexed.

I appreciate Ben’s honesty and clarity as to what he learned, and I truly believe that some of the most valuable lessons in making money online and Internet marketing are learned from the negative experiences AND we can learn from others, like Ben and not have to suffer the same fate!

38 Comments

Website Speed Now A Definite Factor in Google Rankings and 12 Tools to Check Site Speed

Posted by JR in Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Website Tools

Google announced on Friday that they have officially incorporated site speed into their algorithm as a factor in rankings, see their blog post about it at Google Rankings and Site Speed, Matt Cutts elaborates more on this issue here.

All in all, site speed should always be our concern since slow loading pages drive visitors away, but now that it is definitely going to affect rankings we really need to check and monitor our site speed to be sure that they are at their optimal speed. While Google does confirm that site speed is not as important as the relevance of a page or other factors for rankings and that all in all they surmise that less than 1% of rankings will be affected by this you still ought to check your sites to make sure that they are loading quickly, again mainly for the traffic that comes through.

It’s a fact that website speed can have a big impact on conversions and overall site ROI, all other factors being equal simply because you keep visitors longer on your site. Most Internet users are instant gratification junkies, they want to zip through pages, and not wait around while your site is trying to load. And statistics show that visitors tend to stay on a site longer when it loads quickly and overall provides them with optimal performance.

Tools To Check Website Speed

Page Speed – I have talked about this one before, and it’s a very effective Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the speed of web pages and provides suggestions for improvement.
YSlow – This is a free Yahoo tool that offers suggestions to improve speed, also uses a Firefox add on.

If you don’t use Firefox and other tools

Use your Google Webmaster Tools account – Go to Labs then Site Performance and see a graph of your site’s speed performance.
AOL Page Test – Free tool to measure and analyze website performance.
BrowserMob – Alerts and monitoring of website pages.
IntroSpectrum – Online tool that actually simulates your traffic’s experiences on your sites via their web browsers.
Microsoft VRTA – This one provides visualizations of web site loading and provides suggestions for improvements.
MySpace Performance Tracker – This tool is for Internet Explorer browsers and displays possible issues and problems that will affect load times and performance.
WebPagetest – This one is pretty neat and offers a waterfall of your page load time and performance along with a comparison against an optimization checklist.

More In Depth Tools for Site Speed and General Site Performance

Pylot – Free and runs HTTP load tests, verifies server responses, and generates reports with metrics.
Wbox – Performs a variety of tests, including, site speed, server and web application stress testing. Also verifies the proper configuration of domains configuration, HTTP compression, and redirects.
mon.itor.us – This tool offers a personalized and customized Ajax dashboard that checks server performance and availability, tracks all traffic, generates up time reports, checks CPU, memory as well as various other systems resources, and offers alerts whenever problems are detected.

Improved Page Speed for WordPress Blogs

If you are like me and other bloggers and those of us that use WordPress to build money sites or any kind of small niche sites then please check out WP Super Cache plugin. Often times blogs get over loaded with all those cool plugins, badges, and social bookmark and Twitter submission buttons we love to use and they can really affect WordPress blog speed and load times. WP Super Cache works great to improve the speed of blogs no matter how many frills you have.

16 Comments

March-April 2010 Google Page Rank Update

Posted by JR in Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Looks like Google has done another page rank update, so check all your sites. Looks like this PR update is pretty accurate at least for my sites. Most of my new ones went from 0 to 1 and a couple from 2 to 3. This blog still remains a 0, since it went from PR3 to 0 several months ago, not sure why, but as long as it still ranks for many keywords and is getting new subscribers I don’t much care.

Though there had been rumors that Google will be doing away with Page Rank all together, and Google has said that PR matters very little in the grand scheme of things, looks like it is still active and being updated, usually at 3 month intervals.

Again, as always I am not too concerned with PR as ranking is more important and many times you will see PR0 sites outrank PR1+ sites. For those who want to sell advertising on their sites PR is still a factor as advertisers look for that as one indicator of quality and so a higher PR can yield higher prices for ad space.

So, how did you guys do in this PR update?

39 Comments

December 2009 Google PR Update and Happy New Year!!!

Posted by JR in Google, Odds and Ends

Well looks like the last Google PR update of 2009 is taking place right now or may all ready be finished. Once again we get to stroke our egos, at least hopefully.

I have personally seen some weird things going on in the last 6 months with the updates, unexpected time frames with updates and mass fluctuations in PR.

This update several of my sites went up 1 level and several went back down to where they were in PR before the last update, which makes sense since the last update did not seem accurate at all.

Again, PR means nothing for rankings and it is just something we all have to check to make ourselves feel good, but if you lost PR or did not gain any at all then don’t worry about, be more concerned with SERP rankings.

Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!

I wanted to wish everyone a very happy new year and I hope that you are all ready to work hard and make some serious money online in 2010!!!!!!! I know I am .

It’s been a great year for me and I am ready to make 2010 even better. Remember to be vigilant in setting goals for your online business and following through.

Don’t get too caught up in information to where it takes you off track and makes you stagnant, ACTION IS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE!!!!!!!

See you all in 2010 and once again thank you so much for all the support and best of luck in all your 2010 endeavors!

21 Comments

November 2009 Google PR Update

Posted by JR in Google, Internet Marketing

Another Google toolbar page rank update has just completed. It’s funny that this follows so soon after Google made a special announcement on their blog advising webmasters to stop obsessing about PR and how they deemed it so unimportant that they removed the PR info from Google Webmaster Tools Dashboards.

Yet they have done another update and while we all know that PR has little to do with ranking, which is what ultimately matters most, it is still cool to check out these PR updates. Several of my newer sites went to PR3 which was nice, though not sure how deserved, but I’ll take it!

When I did some research as to how the toolbar PR increases compare with rankings I found no cause and affect, the sites still rank the same even when they jumped from PR1 to PR2.

So how did you guys do in the PR update? Anybody lose PR, this seems to be going around?

52 Comments

Bing Teams up with Yahoo – Is the Google Monopoly In Danger?

Posted by JR in Google, Odds and Ends

Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft (formerly MSN Live) has signed a ten year deal to power all Yahoo searches. The buzz is that this is a power play to try to even or over power the search engine playing field, which, as we all know is dominated by Google. It is a fact that Google gets over 70% of all searches online.

Data provided by Hitwise, February 2009

This merger will give Microsoft access to the Internet’s second-largest search engine audience and Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer stated in an interview, “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

Yahoo estimates an overall 500 million dollars in revenue as a result of this merger, as they will keep 88% of the money generated from all ads that run alongside search requests for the first five years of the deal, and it will save them over 275 million dollars in expenses to run its own search technology.

Reportedly Google tried to stop this merger by offering Yahoo a search advertising deal, but that was stopped when some U.S. antitrust officials threatened to sue.

Microsoft has big hopes for Bing and has launched a big campaign to promote their new SE in print, radio, online and TV ads.

Bing returns good results and has a lot of promise, and as of late some would argue better than those of Google’s for many search queries, since Google’s weird SERP changes that have been going on since late May.

The Merger and Internet Marketing

As an Internet marketer I welcome a more even playing field in the search engine market, because the Google monopoly is a big thorn in our sides. We all worry so much about Google and they can literally make or break our online businesses with just some SERP changes.

It would be nice to even out the competition and get more even traffic numbers across the board. Many of my sites rank in Bing and Yahoo, and it’s a shame that so little traffic comes via those sources.

Time will tell, with Google being as dominant as they it will not be an easy feat! Plus the fact that this deal is not expected to close until early next year, and then it maybe be another two years before all the pieces of the partnership are in place with antitrust regulators needing time to review the merger’s effects on the Internet ad market and of course to stitch the technologies together.

Read the full story on the Yahoo and Bing Merger Deal at Yahoo News

What do you guys think?

39 Comments

More Fun With Google PR and SERPS!

Posted by JR in Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

While browsing the SERPS the other day, I noticed this blog showed a PR0 in the toolbar, out of nowhere! It has been a PR3 for at least 10 months and I am not sure what is up!

Spoke with some other webmasters who also had loses of PR in the last few days. I do not think this is a general PR update, but either a glitch or they are penalizing me for something, like selling links, which is funny because I have never sold a link in my life!

I really could care less about PR since the site still ranks Page 1 for it’s main keywords and for many inner pages and that is all that really matters, as it should be since I think I provide enough useful content and therefore have been lucky enough to get lots of natural links to this blog. But it is curious.

The SERPS are still wacked as I discussed in May-June SERPS shakeups and some of my sites are bouncing around page 5-7 on an almost hourly basis.

There is definitely an update or some tweaking going on with Google, that will hopefully end this month. Though veteran webmasters that I have talked with say that they have seen similar activity in the past and it could last thru the summer.

Interesting SERP Observations from other Webmasters:

Many are reporting being hit for specific search terms and not sitewide. So while inner pages maintain ranking, home pages are being hit with a -50 in SERPS for certain keywords. And this is what I see as well.
Lots of spam sites
Irrelevant pages
Previously penalized sites returning from penalties
Many are using Bing, because Google’s results have been wacked

For the keywords I watch:

Very few home pages on page 1, mostly inner pages
ONLY aged sites, 3+ years and most 5+ years old
The big guns are there (sometimes)
Some domains that were bought aged and then crappy links added to them
Old stale articles from Buzzle for buy keywords (which is lame)
Page 1-3 results in keyword searches that are NOT in the title of the website

Time Will Tell

I personally think that links are being devalued and especially older links that are of low quality.

But, no one ever really knows what is going on with Google, as intended, all we could do is ensure that we have good content and quality links, everything else is a crap shoot and we’ll have to wait and see.

nerds1

I can picture some geek engineers at Google sitting at THE BUTTON in some office and laughing their asses off reading posts like this as they send our sites to Google hell — hey you gotta laugh at times like these!

Anybody else having issues with SERPS or notice any PR changes in the toolbar?

42 Comments

June 2009 Google Page Rank Update Underway

Posted by JR in Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Another PR update so soon…

Okay well it seems that a June Google Page Rank update is underway right now, which is weird since the last one was just last month, but all my newer PRO sites went to PR1 or PR2, and 2 PR2 sites went to PR3 and other bloggers are posting the same updates on their sites.

And, this explains the shake up in the SERPS that I talked about the other day.

I do not think the update is done, because a couple of my sites went to PR2 which they surely did not deserve due to very few links, I’m not complaining but I think that it will go down.

Again for the newbies to this business, the toolbar PR is mainly useful for our own egos

and link building.

the real PR (the one that matters) is updated daily behind the scenes of the Google Algorithm.

The SERPS, traffic and sales is what really matters, but it’s always fun when the update comes around.

SERP Update:
Just checked the SERPS and they are still all over the place with odd page 1 results and several of my sites, though given an increased PR falling radically, so most likely they are not stable yet.

Do you guys see PR updates on your sites as well?

54 Comments

May-June 2009 SERP Shakeups – Here We Go Again

Posted by JR in Google, Search Engine Optimization

Have you guys checked your SERP positions lately? There are definitely some shake ups going on with Google and their algo.

A couple of my good aged site’s home pages just plummeted in the SERPS. One site, while it still ranks for other keywords, was pushed back to the black hole for a keyword that it has ranked for for over 1 1/2 years and the keyword is very low competition and now there is a whole lot of junk sitting on page 1 for that keyword.

And the same with other SERP results that are also showing a lot of crappy and spammy sites, as well as irrelevant sites.

Now in doing some reading around the web this seems to be an on going issue for many in the last couple of weeks with even aged authority sites losing major rank and sites dropping several pages in the SERPS. Coincidentally a very similar thing happened in June of 2008.

There also seems to be a pattern with index pages (home pages) losing rank while inner pages remain solid across the SERPS.

Now, while there will always be fluctuations in the SERPS , this seems to be something bigger and on a larger scale and similar shifts happen several times throughout the year.

Some guess that Google is trying out a new filter to catch paid links, and others think that the filter is negating blog comment links. I doubt the latter because my sites that lost rank have very few blog comments as backlinks.

Google just announced that they added external resource loading capabilities capabilities for Flash and indexing of flash, this may also be a part of this, learn more at Google Webmasters Blog post on this.

Really it could be anything. As that famous saying from The Godfather goes, “this is the business we’ve chosen” and dealing with Google SEO is always a roller coaster rider

I am not sure how major this one is, but I, as well as others do not think (at least I hope not) that this will last, most likely things will calm down and the SERPS will return to normalcy.

The most important thing to remember: DO NOT PANIC!

One of the biggest mistakes that webmasters make when their sites see a significant drop in SERP rank is to start making drastic changes on their sites.

1. This is often a mistake because it can trigger alarms and filters such that when the SERPS do return to some normalcy your changes may have adverse effects for your original rank positions.

2. The traffic is all that really matters. Another factor to consider is look at your traffic patterns, usually losing SERP positions for a couple of pages or even the home page will not affect traffic that much because most sites come up for lots of keyword searches, especially the long tails from inner pages.

This is where Google Analytics really comes in handy for analyzing those SERP patterns affects on your sites.

3. Remember to have faith in your work and if you are not doing anything extreme or super black hat then do not worry, just keep on working as usual, add some content to your sites, that is always a solid and safe route to take.

4. And also remember that this is probably not personal but a web wide change.

…Best thing to do in these types of situations is to wait it out.

If you go over to this thread in Webmaster World you will see a very interesting discussion on this topic with lots of webmasters sharing their experiences with this shift.

Have you guys noticed the SERP changes? Anyone lost major rankings?