Panda 3.8 and Google query report

[IanTheScot]

Today I was plugging the SEOMoz Google change log into my analytics and noticed that our site took an impression jump (30%) on the day Panda 3.8 was released but also, if I'm reading the chart right, a drop in keyword avg. ranking. Does this make any sense or am I misunderstanding the chart?

googleseomozq.jpg

[Dr-Pete]

Haha, yeah - I imagine it's something like "Average Position is the average of the keyword positions over time. Also, see 'Mean Position'."

[IanTheScot]

That's a good idea. The "help" on this section of analytics is a whole one sentence long.

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, that is weird. I'm honestly not sure if average position is by unique keyword or keyword volume. In other words, maybe you gained position on a couple of head terms that produce a ton of impressions, but lost position on a bunch of long-tail terms. So, average position across unique keywords would fall, but you'd still gain traffic, because the loss was mostly on low-traffic keywords.

You'd have to dive into the keywords and/or segment them (head, long-tail, etc.) to see for sure.

[IanTheScot]

I plugged in the panda updates in Google Analytics and then ran the Traffic Sources > SEO > Queries report with Avg. Position as the second metric.

[firstconversion]

Lol, no idea whats going on there! Where did you decide to use this - is there an external reference?

Sometimes you can compare two things but they dont actually say anything meaningful

S