SEO sites were blasted by Panda

[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.

[EGOL]

Why did they all move the same direction on the same date - the panda date?

[bemcapaz]

I think maybe they do spot but its not in their best interest to just release it to the world for free

[SteveOllington]

Eureka! (Possibly... I think/hope).

Trends uses four sources right?

Sooooo, if you think about it, all it would take is for Trends to stop using just one of those sources and wham! There it is, the drop!

Now, I noticed people recently saying that GA had removed benchmarking, which will be replaced by something better later. Since GA benchmarking is part of the permission-al "opt in" data that makes up Trends, and the fact that it disappeared at the same sort of time... logically you could conclude that Trends suddenly stopped getting data from that source.

That would explain everything!!

I should have been a detective

[meshach]

Interesting thread! Has anyone got any third party to confirm? SEOmoz have anything to add?

[vaibhav45]

Our Site learnhub.com & Jumbotest.com saw 30% increase in Traffic after panda update.