How do you measure impacts of Google Updates Like Penguin 4?
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Having a conversation with a fellow SEO via twitter and we were discussing measuring algorithm updates.
In the aftermath of Google Penguin 4 how do you determine the effects it has on your site/sites and your respective verticals?
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I look a the general factors of traffic and ranking first. Then I move to pages that receive new visitors.
But I also try to monitor the top 100 in the 'pest control' search at US level. Someone said this was irrelevant as it's not how users search.
I am curious as to other factors: Webmaster tools for Indexed pages? Traffic? Impressions? Clearly a link warning would be an indicator. So what other tools could indicate how much of an impact updates are having?
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I like these. Visibility is a great addition to the simple traffic and ranking.
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Thomas,
I look at 4 key things:
Rankings, Traffic, Visibility, & our Competition's Results.
Rankings - What keywords went up/down etc.
Traffic - Detailed traffic analysis to see changes by keyword and overall
Visibility - This is also important. For example, we had a site that was #1 in Google for it's main keyword (and still is) but now has less visibility because we actually had 5 of the 10 spots on page 1 and now we have 2 out of 10. Still #1 though, so no complaints.
Competition - In addition, I look at our competition's results and changes in the 3 criteria above as well.
How about you?
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I would look at two things. I would look in Google Analytics at a daily graph of overall organic traffic to the site over time and add date markers for known Google updates to see if there are any changes that align with updates. I would also look in Google Webmaster Tools at the average ranking for the top 20-100 keywords before and after the date of a known Google update.
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