More Observations About Long Tail SEO

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Long tail search has been getting plenty of attention in the last few years because it tends to be effective and inexpensive to acquire. For this reason, there are more and more devotees to the art of long tail, including almost everyone who blogs. Bloggers have known for years that specific long tail queries leads to solid traffic levels, when aggregated.

The main threat to long tail optimizers is a “domain wide” penalty, which is never clearly explained by Google, but does appear to happen. There are times when none of your long tail pages will rank at all, despite being properly optimized. At these times, it doesn’t seem like such a great strategy, because these periods of dormancy can last for an unspecified period of time. But when fate smiles on you, it’s a great way to develop website traffic in a way that ensures almost continous growth.

The basic philosophy is that you as you add pages to your archive, you get more visitors from search. You find that you can write very naturally, and not give too much thought to “on-page optimization” and do quite well. Google does seem very adept at picking up on “natural pages”, for the most part. If your phrase isn’t very competitive (let’s say less than 100,000 similar pages exist), you can usually rank with a simple blog post.

The only threat I see to long tail comes in the type of “penalties” I mentioned earlier. I don’t know it’s accurate to say a website is penalized or it’s just not sufficiently robust to rank, but there does seem to be a tipping point for a long tail site (a blog for example) where the website starts to rank for various and sundry terms.

It’s almost as if a light bulb is switched on at that point. What exact factors lead to your website doing this I can’t say for sure, but I’ve seen it happen on a number of occasions. I’ve also seen website lose that “trust” and quickly stop ranking for everything. Google is touchy these days, but it still seems absolutely important to continue to build a large content archive. Because without it, you really don’t have a lot to hang onto. The new content will at least ensure new visitors, who can help you grow overall.

Do you go after the “long tail” at all?

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