When is a re-measurement a re-measurement and not a new measurement?
When three things stayed identical: the questions, the market and the model the engine ran on. That last one is the least obvious and the most important. A provider replacing its model changes the outcome without anything happening on your side — carry on in the same series and you measure their upgrade rather than your work.
What do you do when the figures drop after a fix?
Then it is stated, with the same emphasis as a rise. There are three ordinary explanations and they are not mutually exclusive: the engine reweighted its sources, a third party published something that outweighs what you did, or the change had a side effect nobody foresaw. Which of the three it is shows in the sources under the new answer.
May I attribute a rise to what I changed?
Carefully, and not just like that. A re-measurement shows coincidence: you changed something and the answer changed too. That is stronger than a hunch and weaker than a cause, because in the same weeks plenty moved that you had no say over.
How long should I wait before a re-measurement is meaningful?
Long enough for the crawler to have come past and the engine to have refreshed its picture, and that takes a different length of time per engine. Re-measuring immediately after a change nearly always returns the same answer, which reads as "it did not work" while it means "it has not been read yet".
Frequently asked questions
Can I see for myself which questions are used?
Yes, and rightly so. The question set sits in your file and you can change it — with the consequence that the series then starts over. That is not a penalty but a property: a series whose questions change along the way proves nothing.
Does this work if I carry out the fixes myself?
Yes. The evidence hangs on the measurement and not on who made the change. What it does require is that the measurement continues: one measurement before and nothing after gives you a starting point and not evidence.
What if the engine mentions me neither before nor after?
Then there is no difference in the outcome and there is one in the route to it: which sources the engine read, whether your page was among them now, and whether you moved from unreadable to readable. Those are intermediate steps, they are measurable, and without them the outcome never arrives.
Read on
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