Whether or not your website had a positive effect after the Mayday update, you have no doubt noticed the difference in the search results Google has been rolling out. While they stated it would help clean up the listings, not many people are actually seeing a positive difference. I’ve actually seen more grey/blackhat sites gaining ground, and the paid links are still ranking people like it was the only thing that worked. If you’re an avid reader of Webmaster World, you will have most likely noticed the horror stories of people losing almost all of their business. The original thread about the Mayday update is also a great 14 page read…it may scare you a little though.  I always highly recommend the a Google search for the keyword term ‘buy cialis‘ to bring up a spamtastic research time.

So as you can see, blackhat link spamming still works like a bloody charm. While sites with years and years of creating high quality content, and doing it by the “book” have been slammed in more than a few cases. For my holy grail keyword, link building, I’ve been going at it for years without building specific links and I’m almost reaching the top 10. A quick look at the top 10 shows only a couple of legit companies who’ve earned the rank, and the rest have ranked by link spamming in the lowest quality form possible….wtf Google? Lovely to see a site mostly talking about selling links ranking very high, makes you wonder.

If you folks have any positive and or horror stories over the past few months lets hear them! The more discussion the better off other webmasters will be.

I’m sitting here, drinking my much needed Triple Grande Latte from Starbucks near my condo, of course taking in my daily dose of Webmaster World Forums. I love the topics that come up here, and there is no better forum on the net to learn about Google, as well as in depth link building chat. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate these forums, and even more happy that they haven’t turned into a the likes of Digital Point Forums. The topic that caught my eye this morning was a thread title “Does Google Age Your Backlinks?“.

This to me is a very good question and I’d love to hear what my readers think about it. I fully believe they do mainly from what I’ve seen during my work over the years, and it makes sense…no? You get a link on resource page A, and over time that page gets more links, ranks better and obviously should be passing a little more link juice. Perhaps the life cycle of an authoritative page from birth to old age?

So what do you folks think?

A lot of you know I do a lot of Ecommerce Link Building and it can be a sour lover sometimes to fight the uphill battle against Google. The recent Mayday update from Google took a good look at the long tail search arena, and hit a few Ecommerce sites harder than a lot of people expected. I’ll try and give you folks a few pointers to either keep your long tail traffic, improve it or gain back the losses from the past 45 days.

There are a lot of iffy factors that come into play with online shops, and for those who handle them as a one man team know they’re life is already hell. The duties included with running the shop online are plentiful, and marketing is not really something a lot of you folks have time to handle. Now when your traffic gets hit by a large, noticeable amount, what is a person to do? I currently have several Ecommerce clients, and only one had a strange issue within the past month. I’ve had the chance to also look over my shop online which didn’t take a hit, it is well on its way to double the natural search traffic this month!

Content Fit For A King:

The one very important, and obvious factor that I noticed right away was the structure of the shops content. My clients with lengthy, unique descriptions above the fold saw nothing but improvement in the SERPs. Matt Cutts mentioned that this is specifically what they were going after;

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).

So that’s definitely something to worry about for people with thousands of products. I only have shops with 40 or less products, so I’ve been lucky enough to have unique content for each of my pages. I have had a couple hotel chains come to me after being hit, too many of the same short info pages for their hotels.

My product pages also bring in my social media from around the web such as embedded Youtube videos on the product, the latest tweets and customer reviews which add unique content value. You would be surprised how many Ecommerce sites I see without customer reviews allowed. It’s easy enough to manage to get something going because it also can inspire the confidence needed to make that shopper complete the sale.

Internal & External Linking:

Mr Cutts also mentions that the pages were often not linked well, and this is something I almost always see. Great examples of doing it too good are of course Zappos and Overstock.com, so give them a real good look into for inspiration. While external link building takes time, you can start with a few easy internal link building options.

- provide links from your blog to internal pages…blog about your products!

- provide internal links from related product pages

- add more content to already indexed pages…then yes, add a few related internal links

As for link building, you should be utilizing all avenues that relate to your business including business directories, guest blogging, social media and content marketing. Keep things flowing at a normal rate and you’ll eventually get to the point where the snowball effect takes over, and your rankings grow in due time.

Related Reads:

http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/06/02/google-mayday/

http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/article.php/3887726

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4125460.htm

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-googles-may-day-update-what-it-means-for-you

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-mayday-update-a-closer-look-at-impact/21384/

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4144824.htm

http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054

http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/view-from-the-other-side-of-the-may-day-update/

http://econsultancy.com/blog/6092-google-may-day-update-five-tips-for-e-commerce-sites

http://www.buckdat.com/2010/06/did-google-fix-mayday-effect-on-june.html

Every once in a while I come across a business directory that is above and beyond what we usually come to know as a “directory”. While I don’t advocate the submitting your site to 2000 web directories all over the web, but rather get your site reviewed and approved by a real human. While Manta.com is a business directory for small to mid-sized businesses, it really goes above and beyond that title. It’s really more of a business resource center for businesses of any size. Manta provides a wealth of content both video, audio and contextual to stimulate, help or empower your business mind. Currently you can submit your company for free, but sadly this is only open to US companies at the moment…but I’m sure that will change.

I thought this would be a good read for anyone of any skill level, link builder or not. Google has a lot of patents and I’ve been wading through them in what is left of my spare time. They usually give a good insight into what Google is currently implementing, and what they might consider in the future. This document, to the best of my knowledge, was created by the fine folks at SEOmoz, perhaps Rand?

Google Patents

Well it is not secret that Google doesn’t always pay attention to the nofollow code. Don’t believe me? That’s fine I don’t really care. There’s nothing wrong with a nofollow link in the first place, at least that’s what I think. You have to have them, they’re natural and they make your link profile look good, so what’s going on with Twitter here? Well I’ve done my own testing, so should you, but some folks at Webmaster World got a discussion going on about Twitter links. Seems a brand new site was indexed and ranked pretty quickly from just a Tweet…let me know what you think.

Read more: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4131659.htm

So the news has hit the web that Twitter is now allowing you to embed a tweet via Twitter…so what does this mean for link building? Well as of right now the Blackbird tool wasn’t working, most likely due to overuse so my testing is limited at this time. I’m hoping to get your folks commenting about this, so anyone who has tested out this feature let me know. You can see from the Mashable article that the link is nofollowed in the embed, but who knows how this will be affected on other sites, or if it will remain always nofollow. Regardless it is a link, and it will open the world up to a whole whack of link building opportunities…exciting times folks!