Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Hello,

Ever since the end of October/beginning of November, my site had dropped 20 pages on Googles SERP. I was planning on just waiting it out, but it has been 3 weeks now, so I figure I should be attempting to do something now?

My main concern right now is with Google Analytics and the the Google Webmaster tools. It doesn't seem very accurate. In my Google Analytics, my searches from Google have definitely dropped, but only by a little (15-20%) and Google Analytics still show many different keywords and phrases coming in. However, when I look at my other analytic tools they clearly show that basically besides typing the name of my site, no other keywords/phrases are bringing people to my site. When I try to use Google Webmaster tools to see the top searches of my site in November, there is no data available at the moment. Is that the case for everyone, or is it just me?

So Google Analytics shows me a bunch of searches coming into my site that are nonexistant while Webmaster tools doesn't have any data available for this month (or maybe everyone gets that). What could this mean? How reliable is Analytics then? Anyone have a similar problem?

By default GA shows keywords over a one month period. I assume you've narrowed this down to the affected time scale, say the last two weeks?

Show me 5 different stats packages and I'll show you 5 different sets of results. No stats are 100% accurate, and GA suffers from being Javascript based, so anyone without Javascript enabled won't show. On the up side that means it tends to under rather than over estimate traffic.

GWT tends to lag behind quite a bit -- in mine it's showing the last update for keywords to be 5th November.

Oh I see, still weird that it showing so many searches are coming in. I am running site:mydomain.com each day and the number of indexed pages is also dropping every couple days, so I'm not sure what's up. Do you think its a good idea at this point to resubmit my url to google? Or maybe submit a xml sitemap? I haven't done that before.

Resubmitting your site won't tell Google any more than it already knows. It looks like Google might be counting less pages as relevant for you. You can bank that Google knows about the pages of your site with or without a sitemap, it helps, but isn't a sure fire fix. Here's a link to a REALLY helpful XML sitemap generator too: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

One thing I'd do is work on a link campaign. Get some more links coming in and Google might think "hey, this site is really coming around" after the changes you made. I'd also reexamine the changes that you made to make sure you did the right thing. SEO is a "sometimes it works" and "sometimes it doesn't" industry. Plus, it never ends. You should try to continually optimize, add more content, more quality pages, and work for more quality links.

I was finally able to see some updated stats on GWT today. It was actually accurate, besides typing in the name of my site, I got about 10 searches lol instead of the thousands that google analytics tells me. So I guess it'll just be a while until Analytics does the same. I also noticed that the number of pages that Google is crawling suddenly decreased by around 90%. What would be the reason for something like this? Even if google doesn't rank your pages well, won't it still crawl your pages normally? Or does that mean if your position on the SERP is low, that also means less pages are crawled, but then how would sites ever improve if that were the case, hmm...

Platinum,

from experience Google Analytics is quite accurate. One weakness however is that it is unable to drill down to individual searches. If you've got the time I suggest you install Statcounter. Its not as good as GA for large aggregates but it will allow you to check on exact searches.

what about awstats is that an accurate tool?

Alright, maybe I'll try that. But now at least the problem I see is that Google is not crawling my pages as often as before.


The one that comes with most cpanel's? I think its ok, but I rarely use it because I don't really like the user interface.

I rely on Google analytics and for ther most part it has been very reliable and accurate. Its strange that this occured.

I just noticed in GWT when I go to the indexed pages, I can promote and delete stuff. What does this do? I have some pages that I deleted or moved to another url. If I delete the page will it literally be removed from search results?