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
-
Have you ever seen or experienced a page indexed which is actually from a website which is blocked by robots.txt?
Hi all, We use robots file and meta robots tags for blocking website or website pages to block bots from crawling. Mostly robots.txt will be used for website and expect all the pages to not getting indexed. But there is a condition here that any page from website can be indexed by Google even the site is blocked from robots.txt; because crawler may find the page link somewhere on internet as stated here at last paragraph. I wonder if this really the case where some webpages have got indexed. And even we use meta tags at page level; do we need to block from robots.txt file? Can we use both techniques at a time? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Weird Bing Search Results
Hi all, I'm hoping someone can explain what's going on here, because after hours of searching I cannot find anyone having the same problem... We use Bing search to provide the site search functionality on our website and recently for a particular keyword search, the results include several pages which are not on our site: they are on completely different domains! You can replicate it by going to bing.com and using the "site:" operator together with that keyword. Again, results from other domains appear in amongst the pages on our site. I cannot find any other keywords which produce this same behaviour: every other keyword I have tried shows only results from our site. However, I obviously haven't tested absolutely every possible keyword combination. Bing isn't "padding" out the results or anything like that, because we have more than enough pages referencing this term on the site, and I'm at a total loss as to why this is happening. So, I suppose my question is: has anyone ever had this happen to them? And if so, what did they do about it? Many thanks, Dan
Algorithm Updates | | clarkovitch0 -
Anyone else notice a traffic drop around June 28th 2016?
Hey guys, i know there is a lot of chatter about a potential google update on / around June 28th... well, one of the sites I manage was hit pretty bad. I have attached an image showing what our ranking looked like before and after the unconfirmed update. As you will see, we plummeted that day and have not yet recovered. Has anyone else experienced drops? I'm trying to identify potential causes. I've started an SEO audit and so far I have identified 1 big fish and a few niggly bits. Big Fish: non-www version of site had redirect rule overwritten by CloudFlare page rules and is using a 302 redirect instead of a 301. Now could this be the cause? Niggly bits: technical SEO issues and optimisations like having unique meta titles etc. If you have noticed drops or think you can shed some light on my situation that will help me then I would love to hear from you 🙂 Thanks upload.png upload.png
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0 -
Fetch as Google in GWT - Functionality
Hi, For example, some of the HTML improvements notices from GWT, says dupe meta descriptions or titles, for pages that have since been 301 redirected or had a canonical tag added. So, my idea is to force google to read it using "Fetch as Google" - hoping that it will now see 301 redirection or the fix we have implemented. Does this work? How long does it take? Lastly, should I just click the "fetch as google" or should I also click on the "Submit to index" button? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Anyone seeing big drops in Bing this month?
Seems like our Google rankings are improving on most sites, but BING took a big hit this month for many of the sites we working on. I have never seen them drop like this before. Anyone else seeing the same thing? I am wondering if it is because we are building a lot of brand links vs. keyword links and Bing still wants to see the keyword links. What have you seen?
Algorithm Updates | | netviper0 -
Difference between Google's link: operator and GWT's links to your sites
I haven't used the Google operator link: for a while, and I noticed that there is a big disparity between the operator "link:" and the GWT's links to your site. I compared these results on a number of websites, my own and competitors, and the difference seem to be the same across the board. Has Google made a recent change with how they display link results via the operator? Could this be an indication that they are clean out backlinks?
Algorithm Updates | | tdawson090 -
Anybody else noticing some serious dung ranking well for no reason lately?
I mean, like the complete opposite of what Panda is supposed to be doing... We've just had a discussion here and each went through a bunch of examples of sites that have sprung up and are ranking with the worst, spammiest backlink profiles ever, and poor content with little to zero on-page SEO. It's not accross the board by any means, and certainly there is no obvious pattern but there were a fair few examples we just looked at (I best not provide them for ethical reasons). It just "feels" like there's something going on...
Algorithm Updates | | SteveOllington0 -
Changes in Sitemap Indexation in GWT?
I've noticed some significant changes in the number and percentage of indexed URLs for the sitemaps we've been submitting to Google. I've been tracking these numbers directly from Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Sitemaps. We've made some changes that could be causing the changes we're seeing, but I want to confirm that this wasn't just a change in the way Google reports the indexation. Has anyone else noticed major changes, greater than a 30% change, in the indexation of your sitemaps in the past week? Thanks, Joe
Algorithm Updates | | JoeAmadon0