Sadly turning off scheduled email reports in Google Analytics is not where you might think.
If you are considering ending it all now due to your inbox full of graphs that look like the tail end of an unhappy face, you may want to give it another couple of minutes. As conveniently, it lives in:
Admin > Assets > Scheduled Emails
Recent Panda related changes to Google have left web managers upset and searchers lost. I have owned www.clearthedancefloor.com for about 4 years. Up until recently it had several years worth of blog content on it – until I decided to do a spring clean and accidentally deleted the lot. It always ranked top, in part because it’s my alias, I own the domain and it has lots of sites pointing to it with the text Clear the Dance Floor. Now this is all starting to change in favour of hits on Google’s own services.
So what are these changes to Google?
Google Panda!
Youtube and Google+ are the worst offenders here. For my “keyword” (although it’s not technically even a keyword) I am loosing out to Youtube videos. To be precise, Cascade – Evacuate the Dance Floor. This song is over two years old but due to the changes to Google it is now deemed to have a higher value than my little old website.
Google+ has created two major changes to Google search. The first being that “brand” pages are ranking highly in a short amount of time for general search. More disturbingly, if anyone in your circles refer to a subject, they then become the authority on it in Google’s eyes. This level of personalised filtering creates further changes to Google as it now replicates the experience of asking your mate down the pub.
Amazon is an authority in terms of consumer goods. If you search for a book or album, it’s likely to be on Amazon. What would happen if Amazon were to offer hosting where I could get something like awooga.amazon.co.uk? My search rankings would go through the roof as I would get at least some of the prestige from being on that domain. This is what’s happening with all the blogging services and anyone that offers a form of user generated content hosting on their domain. I have particular problems with Podomatic giving me unneccessary competition in terms of search. Yet they are small fry in comparison to popular blogging services, leading many organisations to host their blog on these services for this very reason. Also I should mention, the recent changes to Google add greater emphasis to its own blogging service.