I spend hours looking into site analytics, making on site changes and pointing links and testing, testing and more testing looking for impact and trends across loads of sites.
I noticed today that on Friday 22nd July google changed things which has effect the reporting in google Analytics. The impact in one case has had 523% change in traffic source.
The sample below show the difference from the reports of google.com | /imgres AND google.com
[click image to enlarge]
You can see the steep drop off of the referrals from /imgress and the mass upward trend of search referrals from google.
Just looking at referral from google you’d say wow someone has added a really powerful link and i’m ranking for everything under the sun but this is not the case when you compare with the referring charts.
So google images has either changed to now allow Analytics to reports the referral is if it from a search engine OR google Analytics has changed. In my opinion the trend line suggest its a change on google images end that’s been pushed out slowly over 3 days.
The site in question is image heavy with about 40% of all search traffic coming from image results so you can really see the effect.
So if you monitor Analytics and trend please take into account that the change happened on the 22nd July 2011 and completed on 23/24 July 2011.
