Google webmaster tools hiccup?
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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?
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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!
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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.
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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!
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