Are We Just Google Beta Testers?
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Paul
2 years ago -
1149
views
It would be fair to say that as part of your routine as an SEO you will use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) log in, review the growing information contained within and act accordingly. The statistics in particular have always given a good sense of where your site is and although you probably wouldn’t use the figures specifically, they were a good indicator for trends, ideas and early warning signals if things were about to go bad wrong.
Now it seems like the data being driven in to GWT is flawed. In fact, for a while now, “Links to your site” have been pretty obviously and blatantly wrong. I’m not qualified to speculate on the reason they might be wrong, but suffice to say they are wrong!
I consider myself more than competent when it comes to link building, but notwithstanding my large ego, it’s hard to fathom why I apparently have so many links coming in to one of my sites. If you look at the graphic below, you’ll see the results are obviously wrong as even with the hard work I have put in to the account, there is no way they have gone from having 2 million backlinks when I started on the account five months ago to having just short of 1 billion backlinks today.
Something, as Elmer Fudd would say, is scwewy around here!
It’s OK though, as we can use other more accurate tools to get this information and whilst it’s a hindrance that we can’t get accurate data from Google, its not a deal breaker.
Now though, Elmer is scratching his head in the Search Queries part of GWT.
First off, some disclaimers. This is a large client. We do have analytics installed and reporting properly and all of the terms (that aren’t shown here for obvious reasons) have either gone up in the SERPS this month or are number 1 position for brand. According to analytics, the clicks we got on these same terms exceeds the click rate shown in GWT by up to 10 times.
For example on Term A, Google says there was 25,000,000 impressions yet we only got 2,200,00 clicks. If I tell you that the term is the main brand name of the company and they don’t have any competitors with the same or a close match on the name, you’d expect to see this figure get somewhere in the region of 95% of all clicks. Even if we were generous and used the old AOL position 1 percentage of roughly 45%, they should still generate over 12 million clicks.
A glance across at average position also shows a discrepancy. Back to Term A again and it stayed rock solid at number one for the entire month. Why wouldn’t it? It’s the homepage with the top brand keyphrase. No reason for it to move anywhere else and it didn’t according to two other independent pieces of tracking. Yet GWT reports its average position at 2.9 which is ludicrous.
We know that it may be due to multiple entries on the page diluting this figure to give an average, but the entire page is full of listings from the site on brand term searches, so that doesn’t work either.
You may also have noticed large downward changes (although some people are seeing massive across the board rises!!?!!) this month. The first clue here is the impact of Christmas compared to this period (January), but we are seeing massive spikes on some clients and massive drops across the board on others. It just doesn’t make any sense.
The other point here is that in the case of Term A explained above, we got less than 9% click through on a brand term with no competition on the page. GWT says this equates to 2.2 million clicks, whereas Google Analytics says we had 4,033,340 visits.
What with places returning strange and questionable results, analytics providing the odd day of hassle, the adword tool displaying inaccurate figures and now GWT giving us even more inaccuracy, I have to ask the question:
are Google just trying to make it harder for SEO’s or are we just Google Beta testers? Answers preferably on a postcard please so we can have accurate data….
Hi, I work on Google Webmaster Tools and spent a while looking into this issue and I think I can explain some of what you are seeing. Since you did not provide the name of the web site, I had to make an educated guess. Let me try to address the issues one by one.
About the 905M links: If you check the domain name, you will see that it’s the same domain as the one you are looking at, just without www. Let’s call the site you are looking at http://www.foo.com. In the incoming links page on Google Webmaster Tools you are seeing 900M incoming links from foo.com. This is the sum total of all links across all pages that are in the foo.com domain and point to any page on http://www.foo.com. It may seem like a lot but when you think about the fact that every page can have dozens of nav links to other parts of the site, it’s not hard to get to very large numbers of internal links. You need to look down this list and find the domains that are of interest to you.
About “Term A” and the 25M impressions. That’s the sum total of all your sites’ URLs displayed in search results for that term. For example, if the user types “Term A” into Google and we show that user 5 URLs from your site then that counts as 5 impressions. If the user then clicks on one of those URLs that counts as 1 click giving an effective per-URL CTR of 20%. One could argue that the CTR in this case should be 100% (1 query, 1 click), but that’s not what’s currently implemented. For the vast majority of sites Google will show 1 result from the site for the vast majority of keywords, and in all those cases the CTR displayed in Google Webmaster Tools will have the behavior you expect. However for large sites and strongly associated keywords where Google shows many results the behavior is the one you are having issues with. But all is not lost. Google Webmaster Tools provides additional data that’s useful in this case.
If you look at the bottom of detail page for Term A you will see the ranking distribution. For the brand Term A in position #1, the site saw 4M impressions and got 1.8M clicks, so this is exactly the 45% number you mention in your post. It’s a safe bet that Google will almost always show the company’s web site at position #1 for Term A so you can use the rank map to give you an idea of how many times in total that query term was seen in Google searches, in this case the number is 4M. You can cross check this with the AdWords keyword tool (make sure to use the [Exact] match type). When I did this, I saw 2.74M average monthly searches over the last 12 month. That may seem a ways off from the 4M number in GWT but if you check the monthly histogram on the AdWords page you will notice a pretty significant increase in that term starting in November and continuing to December (that last month currently in AdWords). That accounts for the difference between the two products. The Adwords number is the monthly average over the last 12 months, whereas Webmaster Tools shows you information for the last 30 days.
Average position 2.9: As you note accurately in your post this is the average across all pages from your site for this keyword. As it happens, the company in question has a brick-and-mortar presence. Term A will often trigger the local result (with the map of nearby stores), add to that the 2-3 additional pages from the site in the top positions and it’s not hard to average out to 2.9. BTW, the existence of the local result also explains why the rank distribution map shows 4M impressions in position #1 and 6M in position #2: the local result has more links to your site and they all count as being in the same position.