MozCast metrics: Big movement yesterday - what happened?

[activitysuper]

Hi,

As the title says, looked at MozCast metrics and it's showing some pretty big movement for yesterday.

Anyone see any SERP movement? Or have an idea what happened?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Apparently this is reflective of code change made to the system and not algo updates here - see Dr. Pete's tweet here - https://twitter.com/dr_pete/status/288665186951380994 - stay tuned for his blog post

[activitysuper]

uh nice cheers Mark.

[Dr-Pete]

Mark beat me to the punch Sorry, yeah that was a code change necessitated by some DOM changes Google made around early December. Unfortunately, they were subtle, and we didn't detect them initially.

I'm happy to answer any specific questions/concerns in this thread.

[activitysuper]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the update,

So nothing major to report then? I have been seeing some pretty heavy flux in SERP's and Webmaster World has a few thread about results fluxing quite heavily, I assume this is connected to the individual websites rather then an update or tweaks to the algo.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not seeing strong evidence of an algorithm update, but it's far from a perfect science. There's flux every day (a lot of it). We're testing an expanded data set that will let us drill down by 20 industry categories and 10+ data centers, but we have to collect enough data to tell what's normal. It could be that 65 degrees is a "hot" day in consumer electronics but a cool day in real estate. It can get subjective fast.

Definitely working on tools to answer those questions, but I don't have much solid information for you about yesterday. Best we know, the moderately high temps we original observed (and they weren't even all that high) were a fluke of changing our data collection method.

[activitysuper]

Thanks, all sounds good.

The mozcast tool is defiantly something im using more and telling others to look at, it's a nice tool.

So thanks.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm happy to hear you've found it useful. We're definitely working on next steps to make it more powerful - should be some cool data coming out on the site and blog over the next few months.