I have been comparing data from a period starting on the Oct 14 Panda update against a like number days preceding the update. I am looking at pages from one sub-directory on my site.
The historical pattern from Analytics for years has always shown LOTS of keywords; a typical month would show visits at about 25000, and kwds at about 21000. I have interpreted this as evidence that most of my traffic came from long tails.
In the period that includes the Oct 14 update, my visits fell by 45.3%. At the same time my kwd report shows a decline of 45.9%.
I see these almost identical numbers and want to make these assumptions:
1. The panda effect was targeted to long tail searches.
2. There is no need to look at other metrics such as comparing
performance of individual search terms from the two periods.
In your knowledge and thinking, is this a valid assumption or am I looking at a red herring?
Thanks in advance to the brains here who have always helped.
