MozCast Automates Google "Weather Reports"

MozCast Automates Google “Weather Reports”

Aug 1, 2012 at 9:05am ET by Barry Schwartz

SEOmoz announced a new neat service that aims at providing insight into if Google has run a major search index/algorithm update in the past by tracking 1,000 keywords every 24 hours from a select number of web sites. The service is called MozCast and literally shows a weather report based on ranking fluctuations.

It is updated daily for the previous day around 7:30am Pacific. Based on the fluctuations in the Google search results from the previous day, it will show a temperature and weather symbol:

The weather report for Monday was 68 degrees, which is fairly normal. When you hit 90 degrees or higher, then you would expect a major ranking algorithm change to be announced or had been announced by Google. The tool also shows the past 5 days on the left hand bar and the past 30 days in a chart below. It also documents the major events since the tool started tracking.

I was an early beta tester of this tool, since I personally carefully watch the Google rankings and provide human based Google update reports. There were times during the beta period where we didn’t agree on if there was a Google update but I’d say most of the time, we both agreed there was a major fluctuation in Google.

I should mention, SEOmoz is not the only one automating this reports, SERPmetrics has been doing this for a long time.

For more details on how this works, see this page.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEM Tools | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://twitter.com/incrediblehelp Jaan Kanellis

Why no RSS feed to stay in touch??
http://twitter.com/rankingsignals Ranking Signals

Love those guys (and gals) at SEOMoz!!!
http://www.facebook.com/the.nathaniel.bailey Nathaniel Bailey

I take it this is based on the results for g.com? Don’t get me wrong, I think its a good idea and could well be a useful tool to help us see if changes to rankings where due to google changes or not, but it would be nice to be able to see this for the UK as well as the US – if that’s possible or makes a difference at all?
http://twitter.com/AuthorityBuzz Authority Buzz

Yeah, what a genius idea, very cool.
http://www.authoritybuzz.com/ Authority Buzz

testsestets
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=535260227 Jeff Kean

Same bit of genius that didn’t put the year on the events page next to updates :)

For example:
Panda 3.7 (Jun 9) – 101.5°

The June Panda update spanned nearly five days and dwarfed previous
updates (3.5 and 3.6). It’s possible that multiple updates were rolled
out over that weekend, or 3.7 included a major algorithm change.

Was this this year, last year, 5 years ago. Us “in the know” know the years but lots randoms wouldn’t :)

Just my .02 cents. Love SEOMoz though!!
http://www.authoritybuzz.com/ Authority Buzz

HaHa very true.
http://twitter.com/dr_pete Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Ok, duly noted – simmer down :) Since the data is all from 2012 so far, it hadn’t really occurred to me, but valid point going forward.
http://twitter.com/dr_pete Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Definitely on the drawing board. UK and maybe Australia would probably be first, since we could still use an English keyword set. Beyond that, it starts to get tricky. We can’t cover everywhere, but I would like to see a few small, international “stations”.
http://twitter.com/dr_pete Dr. Peter J. Meyers

“I was an early beta tester of this tool”

That’s Barry’s nice way of saying that I harassed him until he tried it. I think there were three beta testers and two of them were involuntary :)