GWT: Anyone else seen this weird data trend?
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I have a client who came to us after recieving a manual unnatural link warning, and probable Penguin penalty.
After a lot of hard work, we had the manual penalty revoked, and have done everything we can to get the Penguin penalty lifted. This all happened after the last Penguin data refresh (early Jan), so we're still waiting to see a recovery; but in the meantime, we're seeing some very weird impression data in GWT.......
The website targets UK users, and has very little US traffic, except every thursday, GWT reports a massive spike in search impressions from the US. Could this be Google testing the new Penguin data?
See our US impressions for since Feb here - http://imgur.com/2Bl9a3f
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That's very odd - I'm afraid I haven't seen anything like that. A couple of questions:
(1) Does your analytics data match the GWT data? If so, can you segment it at all?
(2) Is there any reason Thursday might be meaningful? For example, do you publish new content on Thursday or resubmit your sitemap (sometimes, even little things can have an impact)?
(3) Do your logs show anything suspicious, such as bot activity on Thursdays? Do your logs match this data at all?
If all three are "no", I'd venture to say it's a GWT glitch and not to lose sleep over it. If it is a Penguin update test (and I'm not seeing evidence of a weekly pattern), you should see the impression changes in your analytics and logs. They shouldn't just be an artifact in GWT.
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