The long tail, in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, refers to an internet marketing strategy that looks to rank for many niche keywords, rather than for a few common, competetive keywords (referred to as the big head). The marketer hopes that the sum of the traffic generated by hundreds, if not thousands of niche searches will add up to something significant. If properly implemented, this strategy can work well because of two factors:

1. Natural Search: Google’s algorithm is different for competetive searches than it is for other searches. And by different, I mean easier to optimize small, low authority sites for.
2. Pay Per Click: When using Adwords, the more competition there is for a keyword, the more expensive the cost per click (CPC) is.

The problem is that Adwords is Google’s golden goose. Google would much rather searchers hit “popular” search engine results pages (SERPs), because those are the ones that contain the expensive ads. Some of the changes that may have been implemented by Google to drive traffic towards the popular SERPS are:

1. Automatically mixing results for “related keywords” (which happen to always be popular keywords) into the SERPS without asking. This sometimes leads to irrelevant search results.
2. Adding the “Searches Related To:” links at the bottom of the page.
3. On occasion omitting a term typed into the search box (usually a third or fourth term), displaying results for remaining terms, and adding a link at the bottom of the page explaining that the results displayed do not include one of the terms you typed in, but you can add it back in by clicking a link.
    
   
4. In Adwords: Not displaying ads for keywords that don’t have sufficient traffic.

I received the following message recently when diagosing a number of keywords in an Adwords adgroup:

All but one of the factors mentioned above is a setback for the long tail search engine marketer. These changes were presumably implemented to push searches to expensive Adwords clicks, but they also have the effect of making searching for niche keywords more difficult for the Google users. People don’t want to have their keywords messed around with. And when the driver is Google’s bottom line rather than the searcher’s experience, it can only lead to more and more dissatisfied searchers.