According to Seroundtable.com and WebMasterWorld Forum there seems to be a small update going on over at Google known as a data refresh.

After reading the posts at WebMasterWorld most people seem to be noticing a drop in rankings. Sometimes as much as hundreds of rankings for their main keywords. Some people seem to be noticing hits towards relatively new sites while others are seeing sites get out of the Google Sandbox.

Hopefully this update doesn’t have any major repercussions to anyone’s business during this upcoming Christmas season.

WebTrends Inc recently launched version 2 of their powerful on-the-fly behavior analysis and real-time visitor segmentation product – Marketing Warehouse

New features include:

- High Value Events – which captures actions visitors perform online, without requiring
marketers to ‘reprocess’ data or make changes to their web site

- Visitor 360 – which combines behaviour information with any other visitor information held in other systems, such as account histories, demographics and purchase data

- Visitor Quick List – which enables marketers to pull lists of visitor IDs, e-mail addresses and other attributes into other systems, such as e-mail marketing programmes.

Source: http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news6167.htm

Why is it that 2 people in different cities can see different rankings for the same keyword on Google (Not just a difference of 1 or 2 rankings, rather 30-40+ rankings)? This is what we have noticed for some of our clients. We know it’s not a data-center issue because we’ve looked into it.

- Could it be based on behavioral targeting?

- Is it to do with Geo Targeting based on where the domain is hosted?

- What about Search History?

If anyone can help add some insight on this topic please post a comment or give me a shout at: mjasra@gmail.com

Check out the Google Analytics Blog, for their second tip, straight from Google Analytics Team. Last week’s topic was focused on referral segmentation. This week’s topic is regarding the creation of duplicate profiles to test filters and goals.

“One simple yet powerful way to avoid incorrect modifications is to use duplicate profiles to test out changes to your account settings. This way, you can ensure that you have implemented the settings correctly without affecting the data in your main profile. When you duplicate profiles, the new data you collect appears in several profiles at once, letting you manipulate the duplicate data in different ways. You can then keep the original profile unaltered so it can contain every piece of data collected by the tracking code on your site”

Read the rest here: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2006/11/tip-experiment-using-duplicate.html