I was on the earn 1K a day forums this morning and saw a post by Jeannie where she had spotted a blog post of a Q & A with a Google Rep. It makes interesting reading!!!

Many people noticed that their sites had slipped big time in the Google rankings recently (May). This change has attracted the “Mayday” term. It affected some but not all as far as I can see. My own sites don’t seem to be affected. The algorithm change was ” Mayday was a significant update that really impacted long tail terms”!

This article is definately worth a look because it covers in Googles own words what it is looking for in a site. More importantly there are also comments on what it isn’t looking for!

My own thoughts are that auto content generated sites are a no no. This must put into doubt auto content generation plugins I would have thought.

For me he reinforced that the meta description IS important to have the keywords in and said that it was one of the few areas people weren’t spamming!

Another takeaway for me was that the onus may be more on personal backlings that visitors might make i.e. bookmarking so they can find your site again. The Google guy actually said 1000’s of links are not the most important thing it’s quality ones that really count! So that begs the question what is a quality link? A post for another day.

If you have e-commerce sites with a picture but little in the way of content it will be impacted by Mayday!

So all in all the importance is quality content, quality NOT quantity backlinks, site stickability for visitors so they bookmark for a return visit. Plus a multi and social media approach. Microsites and auto content are out. All of that is pretty much from the horses mouth!