First a confession, I’ve not really seen the ‘Mayday Update’ have an impact on any of our clients. That’s not me show boating, I checked all our clients over that period and none of them showed the symptoms that people have been associating with the update.

But enough people I trust have seen the update for me to be fairly confident that something is in play.

So far, in my opinion, the two most revealing pieces I’ve seen on the topic is the interview Bas recorded for State of Search with DaveN and the write up from Red Fly, both seem to imply that the change is away from domain authority being powerful enough to over-ride what could be seen as mild duplication, i.e. content that though not deliberately replicated from another domain is very similar, like manufacturers descriptions of products etc.

As I read this I began to get very concerned a large number of our clients operate in the recruitment sector as job boards. If ecommerce sites were at risk surely so were recruitment site. Many job boards have listings which are available across multiple sites and many even use aggregators like broadbean to bump up their inventory. I would have thought this would make them a prime target of the update. (more…)