GWT: Anyone else seen this weird data trend?
-
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Did any one else notice rankings drops since 14th-21st Feb this year?
Hi everyone, I'm looking for some guidance please. Our website saw a drop in rankings on around 14th - 21st Feb 2019 and the rankings haven't really recovered. I can't see anything significant in Search Console, there was a possible unconfirmed algorithm update during early Feb but I can't really find anything factual to determine if this was the cause. The ranking drop seems to be across different keywords. What else should I check? Did anyone experience such a drop around this time and if so found out why this happened and how to recover? Thanks for your help 🙂 Caroline
Algorithm Updates | | Teepee_Digital0 -
Hotel SEO, 3-pack & Search Console: How to get the right data and how to improve CTR?
Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions.
Algorithm Updates | | Maggiathor
Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂0 -
Searching for Compelling Hard Data on why B2B Websites Should Be Responsive
I am being asked to provide hard data in support the migration to a responsive website for a large B2B website. I have searched for any case studies showing before/after comparisons - no luck. I can easily show: Current data on desktop vs mobile visitors, their bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. Google Analytics Benchmark data - really compelling stuff there! In the past year, 100K visitors have come to the site from mobile devices. GWMTs shows the client not receiving mobile impressions for important keywords, All the close competitors have gone responsive. In APAC regions, mobile is more widely used than in the USA. BUT, I can’t show that making this expensive and time-consuming transition will result in more revenue. The client is a financial services software company, with a 2-3 year sales cycle. Has anyone seen data to support this transition? Thanks everyone! Have a great long weekend.
Algorithm Updates | | RosemaryB0 -
Big change to title tags in SERPs for me, anyone else?
Beginning today, when I search in incognito mode, Google is giving me extremely limited titles, and not really going off of the title tag. The results are horrible for users, and make me nervous as an SEO. Image attached below: wGG7QRp
Algorithm Updates | | WilliamKammer0 -
Will Russia's New Data Protection Law Impact SEOs and SMBs Outside of Russia?
We've all seen the news recently that Google will be closing its engineering offices in Russia due to new data protection laws coming into place in January 2015. The same law has also led to Adobe pulling out of Russia earlier in the year. I was wondering how you think this will impact SEOers and small/medium businesses that market _to _Russia, but are based outside of the country? Personal data has been defined in the new legislation as: Personal data means any information directly or indirectly related to any identified or potentially identifiable person. It includes, among other things, first name and family name, date and place of birth, address, information about family status, education, profession, income Source For those businesses which don't process personal data (affiliates etc), will there be any foreseeable impact? On the flipside, are there any benefits here for affiliate businesses inside of Russia? I'm using affiliates as an example to get the ball rolling, but I'm sure there's numerous more. Personally, I'd be interested to hear if you think this may impact corporate websites which don't process personal data, but operate outside of Russia.
Algorithm Updates | | ecommercebc0 -
Can anyone help me to understand why specific key words are no longer searchable on Google
I’m not sure where to start so please bear with me. I apologize now for the length of this question.Like so many others that I have read about over the past few weeks I lost my presence on Google search results beginning on April 24th. My website iswww.getyourphotosoncanvas.com .I have spent the past few weeks trying to figure out what the problem is and have read and participated in many forums and have read and re-read Google Webmasters Help and anything else I could to try and resolve this problem. I have submitted my website for reconsideration by Google twice and have gotten the following message: Reconsideration request forhttp://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ : No manual spam actions foundMay 23, 2012Dear site owner or webmaster ofhttp://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ , We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.I read this carefully and have tried to address all aspects of the message. I am not a SEO or website expert and have been learning along the way.First, we did not just loose ranking on Google, we went away from the top 100 on all key phrases searched including specific page titles that all rank #1 on Yahoo and Bing. Example: "Free Digital Proofs Photos on Canvas". This search returns our Like Us on Facebook page #5 and our webpage Free Digital Proofs is not listed in the top 100?Like Get Your Photos on Canvas on Facebookwww.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/like-us-on-facebook/UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS TODAY! WE PROVIDE FREE DIGITAL PROOFING OF YOUR PHOTO CANVAS BEFORE WE PRINT! Customer Favorite Example... Basically get back what they think you want and not necessarily what you had in mind.The description text above is taken from the sidebar that is on all pages of our website and not from the title and description meta tags._Page Title: Like Get Your Photos on Canvas on FacebookPage Description:_Like Us on Facebook and keep in touch with Special Offers and information about Get Your Photos on Canvas!This page also shows up for other title page searches? It’s like Google is all confused?Sorry this is long, if you are still with me; Thank You for hanging in there!I have followed all of Google’s Rules, I’m not perfect but not bad either:I have not participated in link buying or building schemes, I have not used hidden text or Keyword stuffing, I use rel=canonical tags, I use noindex, nofollow on pages such as privacy policy, terms of use, and order confirmation pages, and blog comments.I have not considered a server problem with Gooblebot but maybe? The server seems to work fine for Yahoo, Bing, Ask and SEOmoz.I did change a significant number of page urls in January when we rebuilt the website and changed to a new WP format and Bluehost. That didn’t seem to effect Yahoo, Bing or even Google before April 24<sup>th?</sup>Using the tools at SEOmoz the website has no Errors, had a few warnings, fixed and in all looks OK.The On Page grade for "Free Digital Proofs Photos on Canvas" is "A" Here is an interesting test:Search: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap (we show up as number #2 on Google)Search: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap Canvas (we are not in top 100 on Google)Search: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap Photos (we are not in top 100 on Google)Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap Photos on Canvas www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/gallery-wraps-vs-museum-wraps/****Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap, two options for your Photo on Canvas Prints. Find out the difference between Photo Canvas Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap.**I have considered the possibility that Google may see us as keyword stuffing. Our url has photos and canvas, our website title is "Get Your Photos on Canvas" and in our content we talk about "Canvas" allot, how can you not? We have used Picture and Photographs in content to reduce the number of uses of Photos. The content was not written for stuffing it is well written and reads well. I can’t think of substitutes for "Canvas" it is what it is.
Algorithm Updates | | rdominey
My Question is simple, Can anyone HELP?
What else can I do to try and find and fix the problem**0 -
Has anyone recovered from Panda?
My two websites were unaffected by the original and 2.0 panda updates, but istring in June my traffic has been down around 30%. In analyzing it appears that my long tail searches have been greatly impacted. So it looks like I am a victim of the mighty panda.My main site, www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com is in my opinion a decent looking site, with unique content and no ads, etc., but for whatever reason it has been negatively affected. There might be some duplication of content between certain pages and also my links are all or practically all directory links, though a lot are pretty heavy duty directories. I see a lot of stuff written giving advice on how to recover from Panda. Has anyone actually done so? How did you do it? thx Paul
Algorithm Updates | | diogenes1 -
Has anyone starting using schema.org?
On the 3rd June 2011 Google announced that they are going to start using Schema. Do you think this will change the way search engines find content, from briefly looking at Schema I'm concerned that the proposed tags could just turn into another keyword meta tag and be abused. Have you started using this tags yet and have you noticed a difference?
Algorithm Updates | | Seaward-Group0