There are some advantages of being at an agency and one of those advantages is seeing things across multiple sites. Recently there have been some changes over at Google including things like the Caffeine update. This past month we saw some traffic decreases across the majority of our clients. From a two second glance, you couldn’t really see what was going on besides the search traffic decreasing compared to the previous month. We went through and checked rankings and across the board those had either improved or stayed the same. We’re just checking the head of the tail primarily and haven’t gone back through to check the longer tail terms at this point. There came to be some immediate questions about the drop in traffic:

1. Were there less searches in April to cause the decrease in traffic?
2. If my rankings on the head of the tail keywords didn’t decrease, where was my decrease from?

There are some interesting studies about the long tail and that potentially 80% of a website’s traffic can come from the long tail. If these terms were effected, that could be the source of these decreases we’re seeing. We’re in the process of going through our client’s site to see how these were effected and dig deeper. Rand over at SEOMOZ did a great post on the “May Day Update“. I’ve embedded the video below, it is definitely worth a look, especially if you’re trying to figure out what happened to your site(s). Here are a few things Rand had to say in the post:

How do you know if you were affected? Well, start by checking your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd; do you see a drop? If so, is the change in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic?  A drop in traffic to your big terms isn’t likely May Day, but a drop in pages getting search referrals (long tail traffic) could be. If you monitor rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms (which you should do specifically for this reason), did your rankings suddenly plummet? Did your indexation or crawl stats change suddenly (you can use Webmaster Tools, site: searches, etc. to check)? These could indicate you were hit by the update.

Let us know what kind of things you’re seeing with this update!