The Google Mayday update caused quite a stir in the affiliate community. Why? Because it was said by webmasters to be, and was then later confirmed by Google to be, most heavily impacting long tail traffic.
Many affiliate marketers running sites generated by affiliate datafeeds (that traditionally drew decent traffic from long tail searches) saw a heavy negative impact on their search traffic from Google as a result.
We (myself and the other panelists speaking on the “SEO Vets Take All Comers” panel) were asked about the Mayday update at SMX Advanced in Seattle a few weeks ago.
Bruce Clay was quick to respond that he thought Mayday targeted “casual long tail” and that he saw many sites optimized for long tail very deliberately see an increase in search traffic as a result of the Mayday update. The pages he saw most affected by the update were those with “high bounce rates and low conversions”. Todd Friesen very quickly – and correctly – quipped that high bounce rates and low conversions were a problem regardless of search engine algorithms.
Vanessa Fox referred to the story she did for Search Engine Land when the question came up, where she stated:
“This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite. Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).”
As Vanessa mentioned, a lot of ecommerce sites saw adverse effects… but so did a lot of affiliate sites built with merchant datafeeds.
A few weeks after the update, Google engineer Matt Cutts discussed the Mayday update in a video:
If you’d like to save three minutes of your life (<3 you Matt!) let me sum up the video with… it’s a permanent change, it’s algorithmic, it affects mainly long tail searches, and it’s not being rolled back. To prosper in this new update you need a high quality site that is relevant to the search term at hand, have good content on the page, and to have users deem your page useful for the query. AKA “Create quality content and Google will reward you.” (Holy deja vu Batman!)
But for affiliates running sites that are created primarily from the content of a datafeed, this might be easier said than done. If you’re a datafeed affiliate site effected by Mayday, there are a few things I might suggest you look into. But be aware that it is early in the change and most of what *anyone* says on the topic of Mayday at the moment (myself included) is going to be advised based on some lightly tested theories.
Change up your affiliate datafeed
Smart affiliate marketers have long been differentiating the content of the datafeeds provided by merchants and adding value to them, but if you’re a bit behind the times you can:
- Add more unique content to the “out of the box” datafeed you’re given by merchants
- Switch up the order of the items that your feed spits out in the product information pages
- Switch up the URL structure the feed generates
- Change up the image names
- Run your affiliate links through redirects
- Add the ability for users to leave user generated content that is relevant and useful
If someone had said this about a year before the Mayday update, more affiliate sites might have been more prepared for this most recent algorithmic update. Oh… wait… I DID. ;-)
Invest more time in your internal linking structure
One of the theories on Mayday echoed by some of the “SEO Vets” panelists at SMX Advanced – myself included – is that the more clicks it takes a user to reach an individual product page, the less weight the authority of the domain as a whole may be spreading to it post Mayday. (We’re not talking URL paths here folks, but rather click paths.)
This means you need to make sure your most important pages and product categories are well linked within your site. A lot of sites relying solely on a “trickle down effect” of authoritative internal pagerank (real pagerank – not toolbar pagerank) to rank long tail product pages might need to change up their strategy for ranking “deep product pages” if they’ve seen a ranking loss.
Dig deeper with external links
It seems like no matter what your woes with Google, more external links are always an option for a cure (or at least a really kick ass Band-aid). Good SEO folk have long been focusing on deep linking whenever possible to make category pages stronger. If you haven’t yet succumbed to that trend, now’s probably the time to start if you’ve been effected by Mayday.
Those three suggestions should give any affiliate datafeed site being hit by Mayday a good start. I have several more lightly tested theories on Mayday, but a girl has gotta keep some things to herself. ;-)
About the Author
Rae Hoffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media as well as the author of the often controversial Sugarrae Blog.
Get social with Rae at Sphinn | Twitter | WebmasterWorld
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Sugarrae for the win.
Badass content as usual.
It’ll be interesting to see how many affiliates make the transition to becoming full-fledged biz owners, vs merely being long tail arbitragers.
I consider myself lucky that I made that shift several years ago – feels like I have a big head start ;-)
Rae
As someone just building a new site, can you point to some examples of what not to do as opposed to some sites that are doing it right in regards to affiliate feeds and Mayday…
Shane… I’m not one for calling affiliate folks out, so I’m not going to link to “bad examples” – basically, datafeeds are not plug and play – the more you work at not only making them unique (in both content AND presentation), but also making them value add (by creating “people who searched for” features, allowing for UGC, etc) the better off you’ll be… then it’s pushing for links to deeper pages in addition to your main page and top level pages.
Rae –
Thanks!
In my mind, if I have a product that I am reviewing, as an example, I add a deep link directly to that specific product; as opposed to a generic page. And the “link” text is not the generic one they give me, but I make it more human friendly.
I guess I view this from a user point of view: Do I want to click and go right to the product or do I want to go to a generic page and then have to hunt for the product. From my understanding of where Google is and has been, it’s about the user experience first so it makes complete sense about what you said in your post and pretty much what you have said all along on your past posts.
We could see a clean up of a lot of the crap out there. Sometimes a shake up like this can lead to better quality content… hopefully
I’ve only heard of people loosing long tail traffic over this. Anyone know of anyone claiming to have benefited from the update regarding long tail searches?
Bruce [Clay] mentioned seeing clients of his that had very specifically optimized for long tail seeing a boost in Mayday (on the SMX panel referenced above) – vs those that had simply benefited from long tail traffic “accidentally” through domain authority.
I’m all for people actually creating more content instead of having things just automated. I am not convinced that affiliate marketing is a viable long-term business strategy anyway.
With all of the energy people put into re-posting and getting traffic to other people’s work, they could make a lot more money and be in Google’s good graces, just by producing some fantastic original content and their wn products.
-Joshua Black
The Underdog Millionaire
Totally different ballgame, that. I know a lot of affiliates — including myself — who do add a lot of value to their sites, but have no interest at all in the hassle of selling their own stuff.
I’d rather gurgle monkey vomit than answer a customer service email or phone call.
“I am not convinced that affiliate marketing is a viable long-term business strategy anyway.”
I’ve been running a company based off it for almost a decade now, so I gotta call bullshit. :) Just because you’re an affiliate site doesn’t mean you don’t have fantastic original content… don’t confuse crap affiliate marketers with the concept. ;-)
Hi Rae,
Just curious — why doesn’t your tweetmeme link also add your @twitterhandle?
TJ
It was simply something we hadn’t had time to get too – we do our Tweetmeme plugin via a Thesis hook, so it wasn’t as simple as editing a field in the plugin most use. I got to it when I updated the custom_functions file the other day, so it does tweet our handle now.
It’s just anecdotal, but it seems like Mayday is really hitting the sites where people build out 100s or 1000s of pages just to target 1000s of keywords (with no real content). Not only is that old-school SEO trick not wowing the bots anymore, but once you have 1000s of pages of basically the same crap over and over (with a keyword tweak here and there), you start hitting the virtual indexation cap. Just like kids in 2010, too many Google bots in 2010 have a short attention spam.
Unique content is key, IMHO… luckily, you can unique out your site dynamically if you have some imagination. :)
Hi Rae,
Do you have some good sources that a data feed noob can use to learn how to make use of the data feeds provided by merchants?
Is there any software/scripts that makes the best practices you outlined above easier to set up? …Setting up an affiliate website with datafeeds in general?
Thanks in advance.
Hey Ed – sorry, we do all our datafeed spits in-house – so I don’t have any experience with “available to all” software in regards to it. I’ll do some research when I can and see what I can come up with.
Hi Rae,
I’ve found some options, but I don’t know if these solutions would be any good. I’ll send you a message via the contact form.
Thanks for the post Rae, very timely.
I’ve seen a few feed-driven affiliate sites drop from first page to -80s with traffic and commissions completely drying up. These are very high quality sites designed to add value, but they ultimately still fall foul of using a publicly available datafeed.
Mayday has *totally destroyed* these websites and I’m reluctant to spin the feed data unless absolutely necessary – such a time/money sink. I felt absolutely sick when I first saw it, and that feeling hasn’t gone away.
In lieu of re-spinning the datafeed, try some deep linking to low level category pages – a few links to a few deeper categories should help you see a boost and if so, you can repeat the process.