It’s smooth sailing once more! By the end of last week, we were able to fix the categorization errors that we touched on earlier, as well as a few new issues that popped up.
We noticed that our parser started skipping over bits of information in some jobs results types and wasn’t collecting questions inside “People also ask” boxes or related searches at the bottom of the SERP. You should now be getting the full meal deal of each, and any reports that rely on them should be working tickety-boo.
And, after witnessing a full week of stability from the SERPs — no new tracking surprises — we’re confident that Google has finished rolling out this code change, so we can officially put this to bed.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team
[NOTICE] March 16, 2018
Spring has sprung and Google appears to be tidying the SERPs with a rather large code change. We caught this right-quick and have already resolved most of the issues it may have caused with your March 15 data.
Here’s what we saw:
- Unable to recognize a few existing result types correctly (notably all AMP results), our parser mislabelled most as knowledge graphs, some as unknown, and the rest as organic.
- Shopping boxes and places packs on desktop SERPs managed to evade our parser completely, so these results were not tracked at all.
We’ve fixed all instances of parser evasion for your March 16 data, as well as most of the categorization errors. We are still working to solve the incorrectly identified organic results and a particularly big uptick in unknown results in the JP market.
Since Google typically makes changes to the SERP over the course of several days, we expect there to be a few more tracking abnormalities that we’ll have to tackle — and we’ll be sure to update this post as needed.
Please let us know if you’re seeing anything particularly unusual or if you have any questions about what this means to you. Reach us at support@getSTAT.com.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team