How do you measure impacts of Google Updates Like Penguin 4?
-
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?
-
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?
-
I like these. Visibility is a great addition to the simple traffic and ranking.
-
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?
-
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.
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
-
What are your opinions on the Google News vs Spanish Government Issue ?
Greg Sterling said: "Governments across Europe are justifiably alarmed by the declining fortunes of their respective newspaper industries. However punitive or parasitic taxation measures targeting Google, masquerading as copyright protections, are not the answer." Do you agree?
Industry News | | Tintanus1 -
Manual action penalty by Google
Hello, We have a big well-known brand - www.titanbet.com. This brand is well established and the site has been live for almost 4 years now ranking very well on some very strong KWs. we received a message from Google on Aug 29<sup>th</sup> saying “Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site” and that “Google has applied a manual spam action to titanbet.com/” The past 2 weeks since the penalty was received we saw some of our major KWs drop in rankings. BUT all brand related KWs were still ranked 1<sup>st</sup> Over the last weekend the penalty has worsen and we no longer rank on any of the brands KWs (we find the site in 5<sup>th</sup> page at best). Moreover, when searching for a sentence from the any of the page on the site in Google, we see other sites ahead of us in the SERPs. Based on the message we originally received from Google we have started cleaning some of the bad links to the site. We found a lot of links from bad sites, some of them are not indexed and probably penalized as well, some are from affiliate websites and some are from some automatic indexation websites based in China and Russia
Industry News | | Tit
we have started reaching out to some of these sites to try and have them remove our links. We are also worried about the duplication of our site. We have found many other sites (mostly affiliate websites) have copied and in some cases completely duplicated our content. Google for some reason has chosen to penalize us for this. Although we do not have control over these other sites. We have run copyscape to try and figure out which pages are the most problematic and we will try to re-write the content on these pages. But what if the other sites copy us again? Any suggestions on the above would be appreciated as we try to understand why Google has penalized us. thank you Titan Bet Team0 -
If I have a Google+ Business page, do I need a Google Places page as well?
It seems like the two are redundant? Any official word on this? I'm fairly OCD about things being tidy and I dont want to split my reviews / shares / etc between two profiles. Are they not the same thing? I searched for my company, both my plus business page and my places page came up. I attached a SS of the situation. placesvplus.png
Industry News | | jonnyholt1 -
How do i get a description in my google local listing
My site is listed in the serps at number one but where google used to list the name of my site with the meta description below it, now Google lists my site title with my address to the right side and below it says Google+page instead of listing my meta description which had my key search phrase in it and also a call to action to see my video on my site. My click through was much better with the meta description below it and the call to action. is there any way i can get the description back under my title in the serps? Maybe by deleting my Google + page? Thanks in advance, Ron
Industry News | | Ron100 -
Why Does OSE (Open Site Explorer) have such little backlink data on russian sites in the google.ru index?
OK this seems v strange, but google.ru are indexing far more BLs in their SERPS for a widget than OSE reports. Very little data is found in OSE for russian based sites. Is this the marketing intention? (I could send raw data if needed!) What is filtering this vast google.ru data list out? Is OSE only catered for US/UK?
Industry News | | Turkey0 -
Searching for a keyword on html source code of a website via Google
Is such a thing possible? Can we google for a specific keyword that can be found on the source code of a website? Is there any search operator for this? Thanks in advance!
Industry News | | merkal20050 -
Schedule for Panda / Farmer Update rollout for non English sites?
Hey Mozzers, I just read about the global rollout of googles Panda/Farmer Update for English queries, e.g. at searchengineland. Has anyone read something about when google is planning to roll out the update for non-English speaking countries, i.e. queries in other languages? I googled a bit but couldn't find anything, not even speculations. Cheers, Frank
Industry News | | FranktheTank-474970 -
Did Google's Farmer Update Positively/Negatively Affect Your Search Traffic?
See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week. farmer-3x.gif
Industry News | | randfish2