: Apparent Bot Impressions in Webmaster Tools I've been watching some strange stats in Google Webmaster Tools for a particular page on our site, which has been getting some periods of very high

@Nimeshi995

Mystery possibly solved?

Google pushed out Panda 4.2 on July 18 2015, however, prior to that there was a Quality Update (also called Phantom 2) that some say is related to the Panda roll-out. Clues to hits are fluctuations as some call them tremors and spikes.

Here is a quote from: www.thesempost.com/google-panda-update-everything-we-know-about-panda-4-2/

We know that Google has run tests on algo changes previously, whether
unleashing for a couple of hours, rolling it out on a small set of
datacenters or running it on a country specific version of Google to
test it before rolling it back. And there is speculation that recent
fluctuations that were previously attributed to Quality/Phantom might
have actually been a dry run for the Panda release.


Here is a no-Duh(!) quote from: searchengineland.com/google-panda-4-2-faqs-we-interviewed-google-on-the-latest-panda-update-227065

The best way to see if you escaped is to watch your analytics, isolate
your Google organic traffic and note any large swings. Then check the
community to hear if Google confirmed any updates.


If you see a tremor or a spike, it does not necessarily mean a penalty (in my view), but rather a fluctuation in the metrics for your site as Panda does it's thing.

Here is a quote from: www.thesempost.com/new-google-panda-algorithm-rolling-ranks-small-medium-sites-higher/

Pierre Far from Google states that many high quality small and medium
sized sites are ranking higher after this update, which is good news
for smaller sites that tend to struggle against larger sites.

"Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover
a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more
precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small-
and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice."


What else to look for?


A recent spike in fetches from Google.


One article, too cross-eyed to find it right now, mentions a period of heavier indexing of your site which makes sense given the following.

Here is a quote from: searchengineland.com/google-panda-4-2-is-rolling-out-slowly-for-technical-reasons-226664

So, it is not that we are crawling slowly. We are crawling and
indexing normal, and we are using that content as well to recognize
higher quality and lower quality sites. But we are rolling out this
information in a little bit more slower way. Mostly for technical
reasons.


Some possible other things I have noticed that may be clues:


Fluctuations including longer periods of the About count when doing a
site: search.
A flushing and re-audit of the pages indexed from your sitemap within
Google's Search Console.


Your site seems to have been hit beginning exactly on the first day of Panda 4.2. However, my spike was on July 12th. Sometimes, Google actually rolls out an algorithm change prior to the announcement, however, Google did say that Panda 4.2 began July 18th. I rather suspect that my spike was a result if the so-called Phantom 2 update which began earlier.

For what it is worth, my site stats have been low because of tests I performed which slowly eroded my performance though still gave me good results such as improved CTR (click-through rate) and other metrics. I terminated the test simply because impressions have dropped to a level where the pay-off in CTR could no longer compensate for the lower impressions. Over the following period of time, impressions have improved slowly, CTR returned to acceptable previous levels, and position has been relatively stable. Within the past week, impressions have made a pleasingly sharper increase while the other stats remained as they have with smaller fluctuations day-to-day.

The up-shot of why I tell you this is because while I have seen the same behavior, the over-all effect has been very minimal while my stats have, in-part, improved.

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