What happened on January 11th?
I’m a grand one for playing around with site statistics.
One day recently I was taking an overview of Headrambles in Google Analytics and noticed something strange. I had a fair idea of the average rate of page views the site was receiving per month, yet the figures I was now looking at were much higher. I took a snapshot of the period 1st September to 30th June and sure enough, there was a distinct jump where the figures tripled.
Ignoring the peak on the right [a mention on a high profile site!], the jump is is quite marked.
Looking a bit further, I took a series of snapshots over the same period. Traffic to the site remains more or less constant over the period, but I hit another anomaly when I looked at the Bounce Rate:
Once again there was a very dramatic change.
I drilled in a bit further, and the date of transition for each graph is January the 11th. It was also around that time that I had noticed a jump in Google Rank from 3 to 6, but unfortunately I don’t have a precise date for that.
So what the hell happened on the 11th January?
Google only knows!
I almost thought this change of yours coincided with Google’s change of algorithm (called Panda) right about the same time but I was off by a month. “Panda” came into affect near the end of February of this year, not January. Perhaps HR was affected by pre-release “Panda” testing? Google usually does that prior to releasing anything you know.