If you’ve seen a sudden drop in keyword rankings for long-tail keyword searches, then your site possibly could be affected by the latest Google algorithm change – “Mayday”.

According to a recent You Tube video, Matt Cutts explains the change happened between 4/28 – 5/3 – hence, the name “Mayday” (which was coined by the webmasters on Webmaster World).

Cutts goes on to say that this change is “deliberate” and “permanent”. He also explains that the change affects long tail searches rather than broader searches. Google made the change specifically as a quality issue. Their goal is to serve the highest quality sites that best match long tail search queries.

Goolge makes close to 400 algorithm changes a year, so don’t get nervous and think that suddenly your website traffic will drop. Not everyone is affected by the latest change. If you own a very large site with many individual pages that are only found via many clicks from the home page, you may see a difference in your long tail rankings.

So, what do you do if you’re site is affected? Take a good look at your content and ask yourself is the content really relevant to the long tail keyword? You may also need to do some create re-shuffling of your website pages if you see a dramatic drop in traffic.