Which Algorithm Change Hurt the Site? A causation/correlation issue
-
The attached graph is from google analytics, a correlation of about 14 months of Organic Google visits with algo changes, data from moz naturally
Is there any way to tell from this which will have affected the site? for example #1 or #2 seems to be responsible for the first dip, but #4 seems to fix it and it broke around 6, or is the rise between 4 and 7 an anomaly and actually 1 or 2 caused a slip from when it was released all the way to when 7 was released.
Sorry if the graph is a little cloak and dagger, that is partly because we don't have permissions to reveal much about the identity, and partly because we were trying to do a kind of double blind, separating the data from our biases
We can say though the different between the level at the start and end of the graph is at least 10,000 visits per day
-
It's really tough (and even inadvisable) to try to pin a traffic change to an algorithm update based solely on spikes in a graph. On rare occasion, it's pretty clear (Penguin is a good example, I've found), but in most cases there's just a lot of gray areas and the graph leaves out a mountain of data.
The big issue I see here is potentially seasonality and knowing what happened to the site and business. For example, you can look at #6 and #7 and call these dips, but that sort of ignores the spike. Is the dip the anomaly, or is the spike the anomaly? What drove up traffic between #4 and #6? Maybe that simply stopped, was a one-time event, or was seasonal.
Why was there volatility between #7 and #14 and then relative stability after #14? You could call #14 a "drop", but not knowing the timeline, it's hard to see how the curve might smooth in different windows. What it looks like is a period of highly volatile events followed by an evening out.
Without knowing the industry, the business, the history, and without segmenting this data, trying to make claims just based on dips and spikes in the graph is pretty dangerous, IMO. This could have virtually nothing to do with the algorithm, in theory.
-
I don't understand how dates would help? Was it not clear that the red lines are the dates of algo updates?
By abstracting the data the hope was to gain insight into how to read the graphs in relation to updates, and not just get help related to specific updates which wouldn't help much the next time we have to deal with a traffic drop problem. More a question of who to think rather than what to think.
Trying to read between the lines are you saying different algo changes take different amounts of time to kick in and that's why a more detailed graph is more useful? For example if #1 was the first penguin change, would your response be different if it was the first panda change?
-
You can use the Google Penalty Checker tool from Fruition: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/
I would not believe 100% on the tool results, but you can at least have an initial Analise, you'll need to go deeper to double check if this initial Analise is 100% relevant or not.
- Felipe
-
This doesn't tell me anything. If you at least had dates in there you could compare traffic dips to Google Algo Updates/Refreshes.
I understand you can't reveal the domain but I will be shocked if somebody here can tell you anything without further information. This place is full of brilliant minds, but that would take some sort of a mind-reader to tackle...
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
-
Excluding Cookieless Static Content Sub-domain from GA/GTM
For the purposes of this question our ecommerce site url is www.ecommerce.com Our TLD is ecommerce.com We have, following advice from Yslow, Pagespeed and others, moved our static content to a subdomain - static.ecommerce.com We have Google Analytics and Enhance Ecommerce installed, fired from GTM. The cookieDomain setting in GTM is 'auto' At present cookies are being attached to our static resources. What changes do I need to make to to prevent this happening? Many thanks Julian
Reporting & Analytics | | jdeb0 -
Site relaunch and impact on SEO
I have some tough decisions to make about a web site I run. The site has seen around for 20 years (September 1995, to be precise, is the date listed against the domain). Over the years, the effort I've expanded on the site has come and gone, but I am about to throw a lot of time and effort back into it. The majority of the content on the site is pretty dated, isn't tremendously useful to the audience (since it's pretty old) and the site design and URL architecture isn't particularly SEO-friendly. In addition, I have a database of thousands vendors (for the specific industry this site serves). I don't know if it's a factor any more but 100% of the links there have been populated by the vendors themselves specifically requesting inclusion (through a form we expose on the site). When the request is approved, the vendor link shows up on the appropriate pages for location (state) and segment of the industry. Though the links are all "opt-in" from vendors (we've never one added or imported any ourselves), I am sure this all looks like a terrible link farm to Google! And some vendors have asked us to remove their link for that reason 🙂 One final (very important) point. We have a relationship with a nationwide brand and have four very specific pages related to that brand on our site. Those pages are essential - they are by far the most visited pages and drive virtually all our revenue. The pages were put together with SEO in mind and the look and feel is very different to the rest of the site. The result is, effectively, a site-within-a-site. I need to carefully protect the performance of these pages. To put some rough numbers on this, the site had 475,000 page views over the last year, with about 320,000 of those being to these four pages (by the way, for the rest of the content "something happened" around May 20th of last year - traffic almost doubled overnight - even though there were no changes to our site). We have a Facebook presence and have put a little effort into that recently (increasing fans from about 10,000 last August to nearly 24,000 today, with a net gain of about 2,500 per month currently). I don't have any sense of whether that is a meaningful resource in the big picture. So, that's the background. I want to totally revamp the broader site - much improved design, intentional SEO decisions, far better, current and active content, active social media presence and so on. I am also moving from one CMS to another (the target CMS / Blog platform being WordPress). Part of me wants to do the following: Come up with a better plan for SEO and basically just throw out the old stuff and start again, with the exception of the four vendor pages I mentioned Implement redirection of the old URLs to new content (301s) Just stop exposing the vendor pages (on the basis that many of the links are old/broken and I'm really not getting any benefit from them) Leave the four important pages exactly as they are (URL and content-wise) I am happy to rebuild the content afresh because I have a new plan around that for which I have some confidence. But I have some important questions. If I go with the approach above, is there any value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? I am just at the start of this project and it is very important to me. Given the longevity of the site, I don't know if there is much worth retaining for that reason, even if the content changes radically. At a high level I'm trying to decide what questions I need to answer before I set off on this path. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkWill0 -
Question about cannonical URLs for a site redesign
Hello folks, I've redesigned a site completely and I ended up changing their CMS to wordpress as well. So their URLs which mostly ended in .html and folder organization have been thrown completely out the window with wordpress' '/' format. I'm just wondering what the best way is to approach retaining all the site's previous "link juice". What should I be doing here? How do I make sure their organic rankings don't fall? (They've left their previous SEO firm so they can't help me out on this). Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | seonubblet0 -
When I look at my SEOMOZ campaigns I see there are a lot of warnings in regards to missing Meta Tags Descriptions but they exist on a clien'ts wordpress site
when I look at my SEOMOZ campaigns I see there are a lot of warnings in regards to missing Meta Tags Descriptions but they exist on a clien'ts wordpress site
Reporting & Analytics | | Doug_Hay1 -
Setting Up Google Analytic with Sub Folder Sites
What is the best way of setting up Google Analytic for a website that has many sub folders? The main site is example.com and it has 40 sub folder sites like example.com/uk example.com/France etc etc Would it be advised to track a single domain in Google Analytic then create filters for the sub folder sites. Filters > Include traffic from > Sub directories Also with this method is it possible to view overall incoming website stats for everything? Previous experience would be great with this thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | daracreative0 -
Google Analytics internal Site Search - Destination pages dispaly Search results
Hi, Im having a bit of an issue with Google Analytics internal site search, I am able to currently track the search terms through my website internal search but when I click onto destination pages I just get the search result page. When clicking destination pages I would expect to get the pages on which the user ended up after the results page, instead I just get the results page which is pretty much useless ?submitsearchXXXXXX hope you can help, look forward to your response. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Tug-Agency1 -
Setting up Analytics on a Site that Uses Frames For Some Content
I work with a real estate agent and he uses strings from another tool to populate the listings on his site. In an attempt to be able to track traffic to both the framed pages and the non-framed pages he has two sets of analytics code on his site - one inside the frame and one for the regular part of the site. (there's also a third that the company who hosts his site and provides all these other tools put on his site - but I don't think that's really important to this conversation). Not only is it confusing looking at the analytics data, his bounce rate is down right unmanageable. As soon as anyone clicks on any of the listings they've bounced away. Here's a page - all of those listings below " Here are the most recent Toronto Beaches Real Estate Listings" are part of a frame. http://eastendtorontohomes.com/toronto-beach-real-estate-search/ I'm not really sure what to do about it or how to deal with it? Anyone out there got any good advice? And just in case you're wondering there aren't any other options - apart from spending thousands to build his own database thingie. We've thought about that (as other agents in the city have done that), but just aren't sure it's worth it. And, quite frankly he doesn't want to spend the money.
Reporting & Analytics | | annasus0 -
Has Anyone Else Noticed A Jump In Google Analytics Traffic Since Session Parameters Were Changed?
Ever since Google Analytics changed their session parameters August 12th I have seen a 20% jump in organic traffic & bounce rates along with a decline in pages/visit and conversion rate. To be clear, I don't put a whole heck of a lot of stock in these metrics as stand-alone indications of how my site is performing. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this blip. I noticed some other people mentioned a similar phenomenon in other SEO forums and blog comments, but nobody seems to be talking about this here at SEOMoz (unless I just haven't looked in the right place). I'm not saying the change I noticed has anything to do with the session update, I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar so that I can either cross it off the list of possible causes or explore further.
Reporting & Analytics | | eTundra0