Can we discuss Moz's Forecast? It's been over 100 degrees for a month.

[TaylorRHawkins]

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to start a discussion on Moz's Forecast. If you haven't noticed, it has been over 100 degrees for an entire month now, which I have personally never seen before...

Why do you think this might be happening? Any ideas or theories? I'd love to hear them!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I wonder if Dr. Pete is able to share a bit more about where the changes are happening. The fact that a lot of SERPS are continually changing isn't that new. Probably part of some personalization and a lot of refreshments for maybe lower rankings. It would be interesting to know a bit more about the characteristics instead of just seeing that it's 107 degrees today.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, we are seeing a rate of change that won't seem to settle down. It's not clear if this is the new normal, so to speak, or if something about how we collect the data is creating more noise. There are no errors of the obvious sort (or the sort we've encountered in the past), so it's been hard to pin down. I'm hoping to know more soon.

Truthfully, I'm toying with the idea of going with our larger, but less frequently updated, data set, and focus more on things like SERP feature changes, HTTPS, etc. At this point in Google's evolution, I'm not sure how useful day-over-day flux is. The original goal was to help use flux to pinpoint what changed, but the reality is that -- while I can tell you which keywords or categories changed the most -- using that data to interpret how the algorithm moved is nearly impossible. There are just too many things changing every day, even outside of the algorithm. So, I'm actively pondering if the current role of the tool is useful in 2017.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Are you normalizing it somehow? As some of the other charts that are available are showing increases too but not on a daily basis anymore. At some point the new reality should become the baseline right?

[Dr-Pete]

The public metric is "absolute" in the sense that it's not relative to surrounding days. We have other metrics (not published) that are various types of moving averages, but I've found that most of them over-smoothed. Given the new normal lately, though, it may be time to revisit them.

[TaylorRHawkins]

Thanks for this update, Pete!