In yesterday's
Search Engine Roundtable Fri Feb 13 video recap of The Week in Search, Barry Schwartz has an unusual amount of news, large for almost any week. Barry looks at the Google algo update of this past week, involving some very large movements in some serps, which Google has said is neither Panda nor Penguin related.
The update is being labelled as an "ecommerce update", and Barry's report includes several possibly overlapping stories involving both Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics data dropouts which might be confusing issues for some webmasters, as well as a reference to a preliminary analysis of the update....
Google E-Commerce Update, Search Impact Report, Panda Or Penguin Whitelists & More rustybrick - trt 7:31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-I-Wmui4tY [youtube.com]
The update, perhaps not yet completely settled, is being discussed in our
Google Updates and SERP Changes thread for February 2013 [
webmasterworld.com...]
Most interesting to me is the analysis by Marcus Tober of Searchmetrics, cited by Barry, which looked at a considerable amount of data, and relates the big changes to "brand e-commerce keywords". It is a very preliminary analysis, by no means the final word on this...
Google Brand-eCommerce "Update" causing fluctuations February 8th, 2015
Marcus Tober - Searchmetrics http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2015/02/08/google-brand-ecommerce-update-causing-fluctuations/ [blog.searchmetrics.com]
Changes were observed particularly in keywords apparently targeting "typos" of major brand names, as well as correct uses of brand names on small and large sites. Some major gains were observed in small sites, with drops in some major sites. I haven't seen these, so can't comment. I have gotten reports from some small webmasters that they suffered big drops last week, but haven't had time to look into them further.
The Searchmetrics study suggests that mobile is not likely a factor.
Not yet clear to me is whether these were actual drops in traffic and conversions, or perhaps false alarms from WMT and Analytics glitches.
In the video, Barry shows a graph of a dramatic drop in Analytics data of February 9th, which he discussed in another SER post...
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-data-missing-19851.html [seroundtable.com]
... if you saw your traffic die on February 9th and then come back to life, you are in the same boat as probably hundreds, if not thousands of webmasters.
In fact, I checked my Google Analytics data this morning and only have 94 sessions reported on Monday, February 9th. So I am in the same boat as you as well.
He also reports that the last observed update in Webmaster Tools data was on Feb 7th...
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-data-stalled-19854.html [seroundtable.com]
As yet, there's no word on the cause of these data dropouts, and whether these might relate at all to the kinds of changes the update was dealing with, and whether there's anything to tie these together beyond coincidence in time.
Probably most helpful here would be for members with ecommerce sites to compare notes, particularly in light of the Searchmetrics analysis, and see if we can come up with further clarity.
Were the drops brand related? Were they terms targeting misspellings?
And beyond the Analytics and WMT glitches, were there any traffic losses? Other observations, including dates if possible, also would be helpful. It would helpful also to hear from members whose sites did well, and to try to confirm or deny the brand targeting theory.
