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Continued from July 2014 thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4684131.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 10:43 am on Aug 8, 2014 (PST -8)

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i think to mention that traffic is down and some other WM agree to it will help webmasters see that it is Google changing the system again and not the a Problem with the site

My point was simply that changes do not impact all websites at the same time, generally, but instead appear to roll out in phases across topics, site-types and/or localities. As others have pointed out, if there are 500+ algorithm updates/tweaks/whatever every year, that's over one per day. Question is, is the current tweak rolling out in your neighborhood on the same day (or even the same month) it rolls out in mine.

All I'm saying is that if the changes were more carefully monitored here by location/niche/etc., it might be easier to see what is actually changing at any given time and the scope to which that change applies.

It's pretty apparent that not everyone experiences the same algorithm changes at the same time or in the same way. Maybe there's a regional aspect to some of this e.g. a change rolls out in America today so expect it in the UK a week from now or whatever. I think there needs to be an effort to differentiate what's happening in this niche or in this neck of the woods from other places and/or topics.

It takes time to rebuild indexes the size of Google's and it's expensive which should explain index shuffles that only impact small segments of the index. Test it here today, if it seems to be right, roll it out elsewhere tomorrow. What's happening in the US today may be completely irrelevant in the UK at the moment. What anyone sees at any given moment could be a pigeon in the coal mine (a warning of things to come) or a red herring (just an experiment that never gets fully implemented).

One can choose to track it in a scientific fashion or just site back and watch. Not sure one path is better than the other but if you want to make sense of it, then applying a little differentiation to the observation process seems like a sensible approach. Bird watchers can count birds 1,2,3... or they can identify them by type and then count them (birds of prey, songbirds, migratory birds, etc.) Simply counting them doesn't seem that useful to me but I'm no bird expert.
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:56 pm (utc) on Aug 8, 2014]