After tracking some major sites for over a year now it’s becoming much easier to see the full story across sites when there’s an algorithm update. You can get more details on the SEO Platform over at .E2.
I now have the whole process automated, I can add in a date for an algorithm update and the system then tracks indexed pages, inbound link count and keyword visibility – comparing the 30 day average before and after the update and displays this in a graph showing the percentage gain or loss.
As you can see above it becomes really simple to see the winners and losers of any update, in this case John Lewis losing over 40% of their visibility in Google on the keywords we track.
But, it’s also easy to see by other metrics we track, for instance the number of links Google for a domain is a good indicator of a change when compared across domains.
Take a look at the image above, it doesn’t mean that much on it’s own, but when you overlay competitor data…
Here you can see the same step down in links at the beginning of June 2010. In fact the change is exactly when Google released the Caffeine update.
