Friday's Google+ Google hangout, John Mueller said at the 22:40 minute mark that Google feels that the SEO weather tracking tools are not using a statistically relevant sample of data and thus may not show a good representation of what is really changing in the search results compared to the webmaster community or Google's own internal tools.
John implied this back in January when he said SEO weather tools pick up on wrong signals sometimes. In which we had Pete Meyers from Moz write a rare guest post on our site named Can SEO Tools Track The Google Weather?.
But now, the question was asked about it in this hangout and John said "from our point of view, that might not be really a statistically relevant sample."
Here is the transcript:
And it's also worth keeping in mind that some of the weather tracking tools, they pick a sample of the search results that they track.And from our point of view, that might not be really a statistically relevant sample.
It might be kind of a skewed sample that they're looking at. So sometimes they see things as bigger changes than they actually are overall.
And you might notice this when you see discussions around that online. You'll see, oh, this weather report tool says it's hot SEO weather, things are changing, but you don't really notice a difference on your site, or when you use Google. And sometimes that just means that some things have changed, but they're not necessarily the ones that are affecting your website.
Forum discussion at Google+.
