With Google’s new Mayday algorithm updates already implemented on its search engine since May, the post effects are now visible on all major ecommerce websites. Did you notice a sudden drop in the number of visitors to your e-commerce website and a consequent effect on its income? Moreover, did your site suffer a drop in its ranking on the SERPs for your targeted long tail keyword phrases although no changes were made in your site’s account or structure? Well, if your answer to these questions is a “Yes”, then the probable reason behind these changes is the list of Google’s Mayday algorithm updates.

Google’s Mayday changes were particularly designed to target the long tail keywords usually selected by SEO optimized websites for boosting their online presence and traffic. The long tail keywords are searches that use three or more keywords together in a single search. However, these long tail keyword phrases attract only a limited amount of traffic, particularly only a small group of people who are aware about of exactly what they are looking for on the web. People using the long tail keywords have already done their research about the topic and are now absolutely ready to make their purchase from your e-commerce website and its offerings.

As a result, the changes made by Google’s Mayday updates will now directly affect the ecommerce websites, their traffic and their conversion. The traffic that these long tail keywords usually direct to the ecommerce websites is also the traffic that successfully converts into sales on the websites. Hence, if the Mayday updates have affected anyone most, it has to be the ecommerce websites that offer a number of products to its users.

Reassuring all ecommerce website owners, Matt Cutts, from Google stated that these Mayday changes were basically algorithm modifications that will help users to find better quality websites for their long tail keyword searches. He further added that these changes were thoroughly tested by the team before being altered on the search engine algorithms and hence cannot be rolled back. The alterations in the algorithms is only restricted to changes in the rankings and will not affect a webpage’s indexing or crawling procedure. So, what is this change all about?

According to Vanessa Fox, a writer for Search Engine, the Mayday algorithm changes will only affect the very huge ecommerce websites that have several item pages and don’t include the required amount of individual links to each of these pages, are several clicks away from the site’s homepage and don’t include unique or quality content added to them. The above listed issues are however found to be extremely common in the ecommerce websites and hence it is believed that the changes made by Google will now activate the algorithms that will value quality of a page more than its content for the overall ranking of the website. However, if this belief is true, all ecommerce websites will now have to go back to Competitive SEO 101.

Select a few pages from your ecommerce website that previously had a considerable ranking for its long tail keywords and then search them on Google to check their current status. Also check the websites that are now on the top ranking and then analyze the difference between the two pages. Another important change that you can make in your ecommerce website is the manufacturer’s description for a product which is hardly unique on the web. As a result, it is preferable that you write fresh manufacturer description for all the products which will hence help you boost your ranking on Google, despite the Mayday changes. So, if you are still unable to find an answer to boost the affected pages on Google’s Search Engine, make sure that you learn to add unique and fresh content to your ecommerce website.