SEO sites were blasted by Panda

[EGOL]

SEO sites get lots of links from SEO blogs.  Very incestuous linking in this niche.

[MarieHaynes]

So perhaps this is Google's way of leveling the playing field and taking away some of the advantage that sites with knowledgeable SEOs have?

[TaitLarson]

Interesting theory!  I just checked us on in trends.  It says we got whacked too.  Still I'm seeing pretty good traffic to our site.  I wonder if those graphs are not as bad as they look.

[EGOL]

I hope not!

[SteveOllington]

WOW!!! That's a hell of a find. It's not like it could be some huge coincidence either, that many sites all hit at exactly the same time. How do we find out more?

[AlanBleiweiss]

yeah unless we can get input from site owners, I am not convinced those are reflective of actual traffic.  Just not sure.

[bemcapaz]

Maybe they changed their metrics? Every site im checking o google trends is showing a huge decline in the number of visitors.

For instance I tryed

Mashable

Techcrunch

Yahoo (not as big as the others but stil...)

They all have a similar graphic as the ones mentioned on this post, so if the visitors are leaving from everywhere , where are they going? To splogs? hehe

[EGOL]

lol.... you are checking all of the low quality sites...     J/K

There are lots of sites that do not show a drop at end of February.

A lot of sites are down at end of April because of college courses ending.

[Gyi]

Perhaps someone from Moz can fill us in...

[TomCritchlow]

Hmm - not sure I'm trusting those graphs. SEOmoz didn't see any change one way or the other with Panda...

[EGOL]

Thanks for looking into this, Tom.

I have been doing a little research myself..... I can find lots of sites that show massive traffic losses on  the dates of panda updates.  However, I am not finding any sites that show substantial traffic gains - at exactly the same time - which is what we would expect to find.  Right?

So, I am now starting to think (like others in this thread) that the data being presented in Google Trends is suspect.

[SteveOllington]

Damn, so Trends should be avoided due to false information for a while or...?

[SteveOllington]

Some of those same sites through compete.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/webmasterworld.com+seomoz.org+digitalpoint.com/

As they use a combination of data sources I guess we'll have to stick with them...

[AlanBleiweiss]

I've never trusted compete.com data - every test I've done with their data has ranged from "wildly under-reported" to "wildly over-reported", with the occassional "lucky guestimate" thrown in.

[SteveOllington]

Yeah they do admit they estimate, based on their sampling. But I believe they mix panel with tool bar and ISP data, so I would have assumed their estimates would be kind of close but maybe not then lol.

Where do you use? I guess none can be trusted really can they?

[EGOL]

Thanks Steve,  I don't see an end-of-February drop for any of those sites in that data.

[TomCritchlow]

Yeah, all of these data providers are a little suspect. Especially compete!

[SteveOllington]

Yeah even if the numbers are way out with the different source, you'd expect to see some reflection with the trending. I wonder what's wrong with Trends then.

[SteveOllington]

"Especially Compete"... haha, worse then Alexa?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'd like to say "you can only trust numbers if you have access to an individual site's anlaytics.  Except every analytics program is suspect.

Oddly because they're all suspect, I use data for finding trends in the data.  Which brings us full circle to Google Trends.  Apparently Google can't even spot accurate trends.