Google has just confirmed an algorithm update which is said to have impacted the ranking of long tail keyword sites and SERPs for long tail searches.

The first report about the update was on Webmaster World, many webmasters were complaining in traffic dropping from long tail searches.

As Matt Cutts confirmed, the changes were mentioned in the following points:

1. The change is not the result of Google manually selecting some sites to be flagged.
2. The upate is an algorithmic change only.
3. It is a permanent change that has now been fully released.
4. It is completely independent of the caffeine update.
Matt recommended to improve the page contents which had been attracting a lot of long tail visitors to get a good search engine rank.

This change started out as one of the daily tweaks to Google’s search algorithm, but gained more coverage than usual because of the noticeable traffic impact to some websites. While we haven’t seen any impact here at indeed hits, Matt suggests the update is more likely to impact sites that match off-topic long tail searches, rather than being an authority on the topic in question.

The algorithm update will impact widely especially for those sites that use long tail keyword for domains. So we suggested that the SEO strategies must be changed for the long tail theory may not work any more.