I know a lot of folks (me included) who've had web pages that were on page one, which are now in the twenties or even thirties! This all happened, apparently, because Google decided to tweak their algorithm again. This particular tweak is called "May Day" because it happened in May, and also because it caused a lot of consternation among webmasters.
According to Matt Cutts, May Day is here to stay! The bottom line about May Day is that it's designed to weed out thin affiliate type pages that don't have any real, meaningful content on them. What's interesting to me is that I've got thin affiliate pages with no meaningful content that were not affected, and I've got pages that I thought were meaningful, which were affected. Go figure. From what I can tell, Google went too far, and I suspect they'll be tweaking their algo so that it's not quite so punitive on pages that have real content on them.
May Day is here to stay, and we'll just have to get used to it and learn to construct sites and content to rank highly again. This will probably mean making content that's geared toward wowing the human user. After all, that's what Google really wants, isn't it? To rank the best pages on top for human consumption?
Here's another tidbit we need to think about--synonyms. Again, according to Mr. Cutts, Google is serving up pages for synonyms a whopping 70% of the time! What this means is as content writers we can't just focus a page too narrowly on a given keyword phrase. We've got to make it clear to The Google that such and such synonyms are also what the page is all about. So, the synonyms have to be used. Well, when you think about it, that's closer to "good writing" as you were taught in school. The only question is density. How often do I have to use a given synonym so that it's recognized as such by Google. Also, what about proximity? The answers to all of this will shake loose as we write and watch how well our content ranks over the course of the next few months.
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