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| Thumbs Up: Help Raise Money for New Zealand Posted: 03 Mar 2011 04:29 AM PST Posted by jennita Today we're taking a different angle than we normally do on the blog. As you know, recently New Zealand and Christchurch specifically was seriously affected by an earthquake on February 22nd. After Rand sent out an email last week for those chosen to participate in the 2011 Ranking Factors, our friend Kalena Jordan from Search Engine College responded asking if we could help raise money for the New Zealand Red Cross to help with the aftermath of the earthquake. The answer was "Absolutely!" so we thought about ways to include the community. Donations For Thumbs Up
Information About the EarthquakeOn February 22nd, Christchurch was struck with a 6.3 magnitude earthquake which has caused devastation throughout the city. The New Zealand Red Cross is in desparate need of money to help the homelss and displaces. Currently, over 75% of the city is without water and half without power and sadly the death toll has risen to 163. Read more up-to-date information about quake and aftermath: Companies/People MatchingFollowing are the groups or people who will be matching 10% of the thumbs up: Distilled Thanks to everyone for participating, let's see how many thumbs up we can get and raise money for a much needed cause! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google's Farmer Update: Analysis of Winners vs. Losers Posted: 02 Mar 2011 03:54 PM PST Posted by randfish By now, everyone in the SEO world is aware of the algorithmic update Google launched last Wednesday, February 23rd. Several posts on the topic are worth reading, including Danny Sullivan's take, Aaron Wall's assesment, SearchMetrics' analysis and Sistrix's data-driven post. Here at SEOmoz, we've been analyzing the shift with help from our friends at Distilled, staff research scientist Dr. Matt Peters (whom you may remember from our Google Places analysis and who's now joined our staff full time - welcome!), and several other contributors. While there's no way to be precisely sure what Google changed to impact "11.8%" of queries, we've got some ideas that fit a number of the data points and we hope to contribute to the discussion on the topic and help search marketers gauge the update's impact on their own sites. How to See the Farmer Update's Effect on Your Site(s) with Google AnalyticsStep 1: Use GA's date comparison feature to see the same days before and after the update on Wednesday
Step 2: Exclude "branded" keyword traffic - you don't want those terms potentially gunking up the data, since they were very unlikely to be affected:
Step 3: Check out the traffic line comparison:
Step 4: Remove the comparison to see keyword counts, too (this data will also be in your web app traffic tab at the end of the week):
Step 5: Check out the week before, too:
Note some of the key filters applied - the exclusion of branded terms, the use of "non-paid" keywords only, and selection of "Google" as the engine (Bing didn't have an update). Using this process, you can check to see how your sites were (or weren't) affected. It appears that SEOmoz is virtually unaffected, as the past few weeks, our search traffic has been rising similarly to this pattern. Who Lost in the Farmer Update?Thanks to some datasets, we're able to get good data on the winners and losers. First, there's Sistrix, which monitors 250,000 keywords in Google up to the first 100 ranking positions for each:
_ Next is SearchMetrics, which monitors ~25 million keywords in Google:
As you can see, there's quite a bit of crossover between the two data sources on which sites have lost substantial traffic, and I suspect that both sources are at least correct that the sites listed have lost out in the update. Note that they both have unique ways of calculating a "visibility" score based on the rankings where a page/site appears, and these, along with the differences in which keywords they're monitoring, likely lead to imperfect overlap. Who are the Winners in the Farmer Update?Again, we've got some data from Sistrix: And from SearchMetrics:
This data's a bit more curated from SearchMetrics (they appear to be excluding many winners - possibly clients?), and Wikihow is curious because it appears to have gained so strongly in their measurement, but doesn't appear on Sistrix's list. Nonetheless, reviewing these winners and comparing them against the losers does suggest some potential causes, which we'll discuss more below. Do Link Metrics Correlate with the Losers or Winners?Before tackling other types of differences, we wanted to answer a question that Linkscape's web index is uniquely qualified to help handle - are links or link analysis responsible for Google's algorithmic shift? To answer that, we turned to the metrics available in the Linkscape API (most of which you'll see in the mozBar, Open Site Explorer and the Web App). Matt pulled data for each of the winners and losers from Sistrix's data (as we had that several days ago, but only today saw SearchMetrics' post). We then looked at Spearman's correlation coefficient for the winning vs. losing sites against various metrics. The chart below compares the correlations with Linkscape metrics to Sistrix's visibility scores from before and after the update:
There's a few interesting takeways from this data:
Remember that correlation is not causation - this data leads us to believe link analysis isn't the culprit and certainly suggests that having good links correlates well with higher rankings/visibility, but there's always the possibility that other factors are at play. Those caveats aside, Tom, Matt and I all feel it's most likely that link analysis wasn't at work here and Google's using something else. What Factors Could Have Caused Lost Rankings?In reviewing the sites that got hit, we were struck by a few interesting, potential culprits.
Based on these, we have some guesses about what signals Google may have used in this update:
More detailed analysis, particularly of individual pages that won vs. lost, may help to get more insight into these. If you're an SEOmoz PRO member, there's a great discussion going on in the Q+A section and several sites have shared their week-over-week traffic graphs. While some patterns are emerging, there's conflicting signals on virtually everything, so we're not yet confident about solutions. That said, we'll be looking more deeply into this over the weeks to come, and hope to have more to report soon. |
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