In our last post, also today, we talked about Observability. I recommend taking a few minutes to read that post before or after reading this post.
If Google’s Summer of Love wasn’t enough fun for everyone to deal with, they have also started to introduce spurious results into their SERPs when they detect alleged bot traffic.
This has been discussed by many people over the past week and we are also seeing it:
The above posts mention some of our competitors, but we’re not including them for that reason.
They just happen to be some of the largest platforms, so they get referred to in times like these, but this is something that the industry as a whole is experiencing.
Impact at DemandSphere
We’re also seeing it.
Based on our current measurements, it’s impacted ~11% of our daily SERPs.
Because we’re still simultaneously dealing with the ongoing blockage that we discussed here, we’re still not 100% where we want to be (nobody is, as far as I can tell).
Don’t take that 11% number as the final number because things could change rapidly. But we’re doing our best to keep it as low as possible.
We are conducting more analysis and also building Observability reports (be sure to read the post discussing Observability), so clients will be able to see daily trends about the overall impact rate for their data.
Tracking the spurious data percentage on a daily basis is complicated by the fact that we are still doing sub-page sampling in order to provide customers with a complete view of their trended data. We discussed this further in this post and on our Status Page.
Just keep that in mind if you’re looking at the data and things look weird.
They are weird right now.
For DemandSphere customers, we’re always happy to answer questions and walk through your data in order to clarify what you’re seeing.