Google webmaster tools hiccup?
-
Our flagship website, up until March 16 was getting 1600 impressions and 300 branded clicks per day as per GWT. After 3/16, branded search fell to 300 impressions and 25 clicks per day. Our rankings haven't changed, and neither has our traffic. We would definitely notice the decline in GA and Core Metrics, and it is running about the same.
according to GWT, 75% fewer people started searching for our brand on 3/16, but all of our other metrics are indicating otherwise.
Has anyone seen this before? Is it a tracking issue on our side?
-
Hi there
Going through my tools, I didn't see anything too glaring. It could be a tracking issue you like you said, but one thing I would point out is that when I checked out your backlinks in Majestic, I noticed you had hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of backlinks coming from certain sites. While this may not be an issue at the moment, I would take a look at your backlink profile and clean up what you can.
I would also take a look at the Google Webmaster Help Guide, particularly under About Search Queries Data. They state the following:
Webmaster Tools data may differ slightly from the data displayed in other tools, such as Google Analytics. Possible reasons for this include:
- Some processing of our source data might cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources (e.g., to eliminate duplicates and visits from robots). However, these changes should not be significant.
- Some tools, such as Google Analytics, track traffic only from users who have enabled JavaScript in their browser.
- Some tools define "keywords" differently. For example, the Keywords tool in Google AdWords displays the total number of Google searches for that keyword across the web. The Webmaster Tools Search Queries page, however, shows how many of those keyword searches returned your pages in Google search results, and this is a smaller number.
- There can be a lag between when the numbers are calculated and when they are visible to webmasters. Although data gets published in intervals, we continually collect it. Normally, however, collected data should be available in 2-3 days.
- Time zones matter. Search Queries tracks daily data according to Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). If your other systems use different time zones, your daily views may not match exactly.
- To protect user privacy, Google doesn't aggregate all data. For example, we might not track some queries that are made a very small number of times or those that contain personal or sensitive information.
If you can no longer see a search query you saw recently, make sure you haven't filtered the results by country or type of search. At the moment, I can't exactly pinpoint what the error may be, other than to give your WMT and Analytics a quick audit and make sure that everything is being tracked properly. I would also take a note of the backlink profile and check Google Trends for your top terms and see if you can spot anything there.
Hope this helps a bit- I will let others chime in, good luck!
-
The website is www.amerimark.com. The number of impressions for "Amerimark" and "Amerimark.com" dropped by 75% starting on March 16 2015. We are ranked #1 for both keywords, and that hasn't changed.
We've been making changes to the site, but this looks more external.
-
Hi there
Would you mind sharing the domain? I would like to research this a bit more. It sounds like there might be an issue with WMT, but then again I can't be sure.
A couple of questions:
Did you have any major on-site changes in mid March?
Were you ranking for irrelevant keywords/queries up through mid March and they are now removed?
What do your "Top Pages" look like? Does this reflect in GA?
Did you single out web / mobile data to see if it's device driven?
Did you think about conducting a backlink audit or content audit?Just some things to think about. Again, if you could share the URL that would be awesome. Keep me posted, thanks!
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
-
Looking for Third Party Tool Like Google Tag Manager
Hi All, Like google tag manager is there any tool or software or service available who can track my visitors each actions, events, clicks, after click what they do? But at same time like google tag manager it not slow down my site speed? I can say I am looking for tool which can main track different - different click on my pages. Any other suggestion pls share. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pragnesh96390 -
How long does Google Analytics credit a source?
I was under the impression that GA credits the source with a conversion if it is the source for the current session but it seems that if the user returns later that the source may still be credited. Is this the case? How long does GA credit a source?
Reporting & Analytics | | bearpaw1 -
Google Ad referral
I was wondering if someone could decode the jumble of a referral - this is supposedly the referal that led to a click through to my site via a product listing ad. I am trying to figure out how www.nextag.com comes in to the picture as we do not have refurbexperts even listed there? Thanks to anyone who tries/does work it out. http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CGXud6DmDU_qeL5THygHpuICwCaTZwMYD_Nvvv0bEwMS50wEIBhAEIOn5-gEoBVCl7P7f-v____8BYMnu8omYpPQSoAHAhIv9A8gBB8gDG6oEJ0_QwcNc5zNun_d7S5KNcMT6uPjjH_mMDkKFFgBCQ6aKICRPJVVa7MAFBYgGAaAGJoAHqPv0ApAHAeASupqdo-ypit0m&ohost=www.google.com&cid=5GhZEzUCSC6x9n2wxOdz3-mrAfSUkvHKPN3wD5yLInnlNil_&sig=AOD64_1D1z1JPYbFP0UnUglJVOfvd25RfA&adurl=http://refurbexperts.com/product/527/HP-LaserJet-P2015-Laser-Printer-RECONDITIONED%3Futm_source%3Dproductlistingads%26utm_medium%3Dadwords%26utm_campaign%3Dadwords&ctype=5&nb=0&res_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fhp-p2015-laserjet%2Fproducts-html%3Fnxtg%3D116d0a1c0504-9FFEB16DE52A7E2A&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fgoto.jsp%3Fp%3D3652%26search%3Dhp%2520p2015%2520laserjet%26t%3Dag%253D1384181795%26crid%3D48271786%26gg_aid%3D20169721025%26gg_site%3D%26gclid%3DCjgKEAjwzIucBRDzjIz9qMOB3TASJABBIwL1LHK7GcAPS6yHGpd9Kq3wsZrcPORAWD8QCWivr4W75PD_BwE&nm=11&nx=43&ny=12&is=700x181&clkt=187
Reporting & Analytics | | henya0 -
Accidental Link not being removed by Google WMT
I operate two sites for a client. One is a local business and one is their national business. I used the same template for both sites (with changes) but accidentally left a link in the footer to the local site. Now the local site is showing 12k backlinks from the national site. I removed the link over 2 weeks ago but it still shows up in Google WMT in the "Links to your Site" section. It goes to a coupon page and not a "targeted" page but 12k links to the local site is 6 TIMES what I had before. My question is: "Is there a way to get Google to remove the link from Google WMT?" More specifically force it. Like I said the link has been removed for over 2 weeks but it still shows up in the Local site's Incoming Links section of WMT. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | DarinPirkey0 -
Google Analytics Myth?
Dear Moz-members, I have read several discussions regarding not to implement Google analytics on your website. Reason: Google is tracking your website behavior, for example you have a high bounce rate it will affect your rankings negative. See it as we are opening the doors too much to Google so it can have a negative impact on your online business, especially when your site is new and you are still building your credit. Because of this i have not chosen to install GA. What is your experience with this? Most of the time if i read analytics posts at Seomoz, people do have GA installed. I am also in doubt whether to switch over at GA, but then again mine site is relative new and i am still working on the negative bounce rate/daily visitors. Would like to hear from you pro's whether this is a myth or not 🙂 Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | mcweb0 -
Wordpress + Google Analytics = Pulling My Hair Out
Hey Mozzers, Quick question for you- I have analytics set-up for a personal site I run and I know, verifiably it's receiving traffic, however, whenever I access my Google Analytics dashboard, it says I've had zero visits. Interestingly, today I had a colleague check the site from a foreign country and I could see the page views (within 15 minutes), however, I could not get any information about the site viewer. I have verified that the Analytics profile is 'receiving data' (which it is) and my Google Webmaster Tools is not reporting any issues? Finally, I went ahead and updated my profile so that it is pulling from 'www.mydomain.com' instead of 'mydomain.com', I don't know if that'll make any difference, but likewise, I didn't want to go and create the 'little kid in the elevator' analogy, where I'm just pressing a bunch of buttons just because they're there. So the only changes I've made thus far were deactivating Yoast's SEO plug-in and manually placing the GA code in the header and updating the 'Website's URL' in the profile settings tab of GA from 'mydomain.com' to 'www.mydomain.com'. With that, I am stumped and praying another one of the esteemed Mozzers out there may be able to help me resolve this. Any thoughts?
Reporting & Analytics | | NiallSmith0 -
Weird drop in ranks... google.fr
Hello folks, Before our domain: <cite>www.convertisseurvideo.net</cite> Keyword: convertisseur video ( convert your video ) is at the first(page) google.fr for this keyword search. Right now, its at second page, really dropped. And our CTR = 1% . How can we improve the CTR? Any toughts ? Thanks. ss.JPG
Reporting & Analytics | | augustos0