May 12th, 2010 | Bill McIntosh, Founder

There has been a lot of online buzz about the latest Google search engine update which happened on May 1st. Not only did the mighty search engine change the look and feel of its search result pages, but they shuffled rankings quite a bit.

While it’s too early to know all the factors involved in these new rankings, it seems that long tail keyword phrases were hit the hardest, as many people have noticed.  However, pages that were benefiting from a solid and constant link building strategy seem to be safe and in some cases, even increased in ranking.

So what can you do about this?

Check your traffic reports and compare the data before and after May 1st.  You may see that some pages dropped while other remain steady, or increased.  Look at the difference between these pages (from page optimization to number of backlinks) and it should give you an idea of what needs to be done in terms of search engine optimization to rank well in Google’s new universe.