mantucket - 6:24 am on Jun 5, 2010 (gmt 0)

Even if goog made no alg changes, rankings would still fluctuate day-to-day as
new pages are spidered, links expire, etc.

Given that google makes changes at will with no regard to the massive damage they might cause,
we are in the position of trying to parse out different sets of 'symptoms' by what they have in common, and try to isolate those from overlapping changes.

In addition, we have to consider what impact changes to our sites may have had.
In my case, during March/April I was busily trying to be a good googie and improve page speed,
by migrating site to faster server. I also thought I'd bolster site authority by investing in
several quality directory listings - yahoo, BOTW, etc.

Thing is, it took google over a month to recognize the Yahoo directory link, and gwt never reported finding the links from the other 'quality' directories. Things went downhill quickly after I got those listings and moved servers, in fact.

If 400 of 2000 links suddenly disappear, how do you 'diff' the GWT spreadsheets to identify what's missing?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:29 am (utc) on Jun 5, 2010]