Most of the data toolsets published some analysis around the March 2019 Google core update that took place on March 12th but not Moz. Want to know why? Well both Dr. Pete Meyers and Russ Jones from Moz shared why on Twitter after being called out for not sharing data around the update.
Here is where they were called out by someone with a really lame rational on why Moz didn’t publish anything on this update:
I sleep on pillows filled with cash that @johnmu mails me in unmarked bills every Tuesday
— Russ Jones (@rjonesx) April 2, 2019
As you can see, Russ was responding with sarcasm.
So why didn’t they publish something, like a winners/losers? Russ explained that the data set isn’t large enough to provide useful analysis that helps the SEO community.
That leaves us with only the ability to use intuition, human observation, and maybe some modest statistics (although it would be highly speculative) to identify the changes. There are more than enough competent SEOs in this industry to run that type of analysis.
— Russ Jones (@rjonesx) April 2, 2019
It is bullshit if you try to use winner/loser lists to do a deeper statistical analysis. One would need a much cleaner, larger, rigorously scrubbed training set
— Russ Jones (@rjonesx) April 2, 2019
Pete added that Moz knows that those blog posts would do well but they intentionally do not post something when they know the results won’t be useful to the reader. I like that!
Truth is, we leave money on the table when we don’t post about major updates. It would be easy to throw up a winners/losers list, but we don’t unless we have substantial and useful data to offer.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) April 2, 2019
I posted some findings on Twitter, but it wasn’t enough to merit a full post.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) April 2, 2019
As you know, there was a lot of speculation and analysis done with both winners and losers and SEOs digging in by hand looking at client data. But even after I personally reviewed over 500 sites – I didn’t come up with anything solid to share outside of Google’s advice of make your site better, in a general way. 🙂
What do you think? Maybe it would be useful for Moz to say, hey – we looked at our data, we didn’t come up with anything that useful – so carry on?
Forum discussion at Twitter.