Over the last month, there has been quite a bit of talk in the SEO community about Google’s “Mayday Update” which has appeared to have an impact on larger sites. Additionally, websites that get a fair portion of “long tail” traffic (which is aggregate traffic from keywords with 3 or more keywords) have noted a distinct difference in Google traffic starting around May 1. While this update may have had little or no impact on many mom-and-pop websites with a couple of specialties, other businesses are seeing a sales drop that matches up with lost Google traffic.

What’s behind the update? According to sources in the SEO world, Google has essentially changed the way it indexes pages with less trust associated with them. This can be a problem for some people who have trusted sites but have pages that are further down in the silo with fewer links pointing at them. Previously, less link popularity wasn’t as much of a problem for these pages, and latent semantic matching may have helped them rank for long-tail keywords that did not exist contiguously on the page. Put another way, if you are a big widget seller, someone may have gotten to your site by typing in “widgets blue polka dots” when you don’t have that exact phrase on your “blue polka dot widgets” page. There is a school of thought that you should now have more link popularity on interior pages, and better matches for long tail phrases.

The problem with trying to match up long tail phrases is that they are often “one shot” searches. At Web.com Search Agency, we can see a large bulk of “one time only” queries that, when added up, send tens of thousands of visitors to sites every year. The process of keyword research and content writing would not  reveal such keywords or convince the average webmaster to do SEO around an esoteric search.

Are there any solutions to the Mayday update? Obviously, all of that “lost” traffic has to be going somewhere, so one person’s lost traffic is another person’s windfall. To recover, it may be necessary to get more link popularity to interior pages, perhaps by strengthening links to categories and subcategories that provide “link juice” to these pages. Secondarily, it may pay to revisit some of the pages that were generating traffic in the past and bulk up the content on those pages by utilizing a few of the longer-tail terms that provide a worthwhile amount of traffic. When dealing with any update, it is generally best to focus on top converting keywords first, so you can concentrate on maintaining a revenue stream prior to investing in a wholesale change on a major site.

Google’s Mayday Update is apparently here to stay. Even though it may be impacting your traffic and revenue, there is still no better time to improve the quality of your site in the eyes of Google. Better link building, improved content, and more resource-oriented material on your site are best practices that have been in place for some time, and as SEO techniques they still hold up when it comes to securing good rankings. On the positive side, the Google Mayday Update was designed to filter out spammy pages and questionable sites, so you may have less competition from “junk sites” in your quest to get good rankings. If your search optimization project is still a work in progress, this update may actually be clearing a path for higher rankings and better traffic.

What if you could improve the link popularity of links that may already be pointing at your site? With link reclamation, you can do just that. If your site has been around for awhile, you may already have quite a few links from external sites that are pointing at low-value pages, missing pages, or pages that you have redirected to new locations. Similarly, you may have links pointing at you with poor anchor text or anchors that refer to services you no longer even offer. With link reclamation, you can turn these old links into stronger new ones.

If you want to reclaim your links, you can either do it yourself or hire an agency (such as Web.com Search Agency) to do it for you. Since one of our core competencies involves contacting people in order to secure high grade links for customers, we have systems in place that may make it easier to re-orient these links on your behalf in less time. Like many aspects of the SEO process, link reclamation requires a certain amount of skill since a retargeted link should be descriptive, match a certain keyword root phrase, and avoid potential penalties that can arise if too many anchor texts are identical. As part of an overall linking strategy, link reclamation can help re-power keyword phrases that may be slipping due to competition, or add high grade links to new product and service lines that were not originally available.

A secondary benefit that comes from link reclamation involves getting traffic from external websites. Given the high cost of Pay-Per-Click traffic, visits from a relevant referring site can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars every month. When you consider that many sites essentially “throw away” this traffic by dropping it on 404 (Not Found) pages, you can understand how a reclamation project may improve your bottom line with minimal expenses.

Link reclamation also presents a secondary value when you consider that the site sending out the link has probably also increased in SEO value since the link was originally placed. A refurbished link from such a site can enhance link popularity by replacing an unfocused link (like one that referenced a URL or site name) with one that has a more direct match with a competitive keyword.

Are there any downsides to link reclamation? Possibly. Any time you change the destination of an existing link, you are potentially changing the “age” of the link since it points at a new page. However, if that link is pointing at a bad page, or a redirect, you have more potential to gain link popularity. Additionally, it is up to the site owner to decide whether to upgrade your link, and your request could always prompt the webmaster to remove the link entirely. Once again, if the link has less value in its current condition, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

As stated above, the practice of link reclamation works best for sites that have been around for awhile. It may also be a more likely scenario for larger sites that have had changes over the years, as opposed to small sites that have kept the same overall directory structure. As a housecleaning practice, it can definitely provide value to your site in the eyes of the search engines, since a site with better external endorsements from other “trusted sites” has a far better chance of ranking than a site with links that may be unclear or confusing.