If you follow me on Twitter at all (and, if so, may God have mercy on your soul), you may have seen me saying things like this over the past couple of months…
…and you may have found yourself wondering “Where does he get all that wonderful data?” Like all of the best things in life – cookies, babies, belly button lint – the answer is that I made it myself. Luckily for you, I’m in a sharing mood.
Welcome to MozCast
So today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Mozcast.com – the Google weather report. You can visit it right now, and it looks something like this:
The first thing you'll notice (besides Roger's smiling face), is yesterday's weather. The hotter and stormier the weather, the more Google's algorithm changed over the past 24 hours (a "normal" day is roughly 70°F). The weather report updates automatically each morning (about 7:30am Pacific Time currently, but that may change over time).
5-day & 30-day Reports
One every page of MozCast.com, you can view a 5-day history on the left-hand side of the screen. The home-page also provides a complete 30-day history – mouse over any day on the graph for the date and a specific temperature reading. In the near future, we'll be adding a 30-day average and may open up more historical data.
How Does It work?
There's a detailed explanation on the MozCast site, but here are the basics. We track a hand-selected set of 1,000 keywords every 24 hours. Those keywords are delocalized, depersonalized, split evenly across 5 "bins" of search volume and are tracked from roughly the same location and the same time every day. Our goal has been to keep the system as controlled as possible.
For each keyword, we store the top 10 Google organic results, and then we compare those results to the previous day. We calculate a metric called "Delta10", which is essentially the rate of change across the entire top 10. Then we take the average of all Delta10s (which ranges from 1-10) to measure the daily flux. We multiply that by a fixed value (currently, 28.0), and that becomes the day's temperature on MozCast.
Each temperature is also converted into one of five weather states: sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, rainy, or stormy. These are completely dependent on the temperature - think of it as the quick view. The stormier it is, the more rankings changed. If it's really hot and stormy, odds are good that something big changed in the algorithm. You can see more in the launch presentation from Mozcon below:
Get Twitter Updates
We've also created a new Twitter account @mozcast - stay tuned there for daily weather reports, feature updates, and occasional deep dives into unusual events. If you're at Mozcon, I'll be at the Garage party tonight and around all day Friday, so please feel free to stop me and ask questions about MozCast. I hope it keeps you out of the rain, even here in Seattle.
Be great to see this in Degrees Celsius for us Brits!
Great Post! Awesome Product! Do you know what will be awesome?
SEOMoz Tracks who knows how many keywords... have you guys thought about using that data?
Yeah, it gets a bit tricky. Since SEOmoz tracks customer data, the keywords tracked change every day (as people add/remove) and tend to have strong commercial intent. We decided to build a smaller system, but hand-select keywords, keep them consistent, and check each keyword from the same location at roughly the same time every day. That's just not feasible with our full data set (totally different goals).
We're looking to expand from 1K to 10-25K in the next few months. We just need a scalable way to build a solid keyword sample.
I like the web design.
Any plans on having a weather feed? So people could display the daily Google weather on their site if they wanted, just an idea.
or an embedible version (great link bait)
We're working on a widget. Maybe sometime next week? Stay tuned to the @mozcast Twitter feed, and we'll announce new features there (or on the "News" tab of the site).
Love it. This is such a great, simple, measured way of keeping an eye on what's actually going on in the frenzied world of the Google algo update.
Now all we need are daily videos of Dr. Pete dressed up as a weather girl to accompany the stats ;)
It disturbs me how many people asked for that "feature" :)
I have made it my new home page! Very nice work. Now you just need to add the weather "person" giving the 3 minute update. "A High Pressure system over the new Panda update should cause some storms this week..."
Al Roker, meet Roger.
Thrilled to see this, Dr. Pete - I knew you had something in the works, and I'm glad to see you're sharing it so generously :) I'm betting there are a lot of useful insights that could be pulled from data that you're gathering - any additional plans?
Definitely - now that the project is up, we have to sit down and sort out next steps, but a lot of ideas from this week.
This is amazing! Great job.
I'd put something like a legend on the homepage for the 5 possible states.
This is an amazing piece of information Dr.Peter! Can we get such data for our personal websites or its just confined to generic websites? Knowing Google's average weather forecast would be helpful tool in designing our SEO plans and strategies for the coming month. Three cheers to this unique weather forecast...
Love the new tool! It's brilliant. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Ahh, the brilliance of this product. I love it's simplicity.
I was thrilled to be able to say this in person at MozCon, but it's worth saying again. This was a brilliant and much needed addition to the industry's toolset.
Hooray!
hahaha, I love the idea!
I love this. Very funny. When should we get an umbrella.
As soon as you hear the waddle of the evil penguin would be a good time to get the umbrella out.
Great tool thank you.
It seems like very useful tool. I do think it's pretty important to track changes in Google algorithms.
Be great if there was Celsius option :)
Great idea...ill add this to my weather forecast checks.
Hi folks, just a bit of feedback.
The Events page is looking a bit neglected. As at today's date it only lists changes up to June 18, whereas your Algorithm History page has 8 changes recorded since then (admittedly, not all of which would necessarily affect the weather report).
Also, the Events page lists Panda 3.7 rolling out on June 9th, whereas the Algo page lists the date as June 8th.
I don't mean to appear like I'm nit-picking, but folks might use the given dates to check correlation in Analytics, so I guess consistency matters.
Nice tool 'though, and another clever idea from the SEOmoz stable.
Duly noted - overhauling that has definitely been on my to-do list. We're trying not to duplicate the Algo History, but that page was a first draft for launch and needs to be revisited. I'll check the Panda 3.7 dates - we might've used the "official" date for the Algo History and the peak-flux date for MozCast. It was weird, since it was a multi-day roll-out.
This is a really cool little site you guys set up. Nicely done.
There was some activity on July 27th but nothing is mentioned on the "Events" page. Does it take a few days to gather the information about what happened so the data will appear later, or is it based on how high the temperature went e.g., it has to be over 90 for the event to be listed on the events page?
Love the tool! I've seen lists before that just include the dates and names of events and even some that include descriptions of events, but this is a quick and easy tool to use. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IT!
We're trying to pin down some oddities in the data over the past few days. It appears that Panda 3.9 had a multi-day rollout, but we have two data collection stations, and they're mismatching (they usually return very similar results).
Currently, the "Events" page mostly lists named events, so that you can see the severity levels in our data. If an event is unnamed and we don't have a solid explanation, we end up not sure what to say about it. We're hoping to create some stage-two analysis tools soon, so that we can easily dig into any spike and see what may have changed. Right now, that's a semi-manual process (a whole lot of MySQL tinkering).
This is awesome. Super quirky idea!
I have my very own google weather forecaster its called traffic drops or increases. I have found that to be the only accurate way to predict what Google is doing anymore and at the end of the day its the only thing that really matters.
The problem with just tracking your own keywords is separating out the impact of your own actions from the impact of the algorithm in general. Seeing both numbers is one more way of determining when correlation equals causation. I see it as a defensive strategy, ultimately, and more information is always good (used wisely).
Somehow I missed this until the Moz Top 10 email. I cannot believe the scope of your research. I didn't even understand some of it! Amazing.
Good idea guys and awesome idea for a new tool. I would actually like to see something like this not just for Google, but other applications Facebook, Bing, etc.
Similar to checking the weather of other locations, you can check the weather of other search engines. Again, just a thought, but I love this original idea.
ha ha this is great! i saw a link for the 'cast' this morning and had to check it out!
I guess it would be good thing for SEO.
That means every day update? Just yes!
This is awesome, love the idea! Will use this a lot.
Great idea! Thanks for sharing this tool with us!
Very impressive and funny, too! I am not sure how meaningful that mozcast report is in reality, but it certainly is an indicator towards the algorithm.
I would be interested in some keyword examples out of your selected set?
We're going to try to give more breakdowns soon. We're a little hesitant to release the keyword list, since we're running that on Google every night :)
Great fun! Weather report from major players of SEO industry!
It looks like the weather gets worst during the weekends. Thanks for sharing.
Historically, Google has actually been very quiet on weekends, but June kind of blew that pattern out of the water, with two multi-day weekend updates.
Very cool, love the way the data is visualized. The Major weather events page is a nice feature to cross reference with your own web stats to see if/to what degree your site may have been affected.
I really like the idea, love to see the cool positive changes from google..
It's really cool, but I would add some notes for quick reference noting cleaner major algorithm updates or refreshes too :P
We're definitely going to beef up the data/display over the next few months. Just want to get a sense of how people use it.
Nice job!!
The next step will be the weather... forecast?
Very cool Doc! Thanks for sharing!
What a great idea Dr. Pete!
We’d imagine some keywords are a lot stormier than others. For example anything in finance tends to change a lot. Whereas if you had a keyword with a lot of brands ranking there tend to be less movement. Is there a way of grouping the keywords by sector to show the weather in each industry?
That would get our vote as a future feature, but even as it stands now this is a very fascinating insight.
We don't have the data volume yet to break it out by niches (the group we cut out would be too small), so that's our next step. Once we have a bigger data set, that'll be a lot more doable.
Been keen to find about more about your Delta figures for a while, after reading the slides earlier the last page now makes sense!
Good stuff Dr. Pete
We'll try to keep it TAGFEE and kind of an open experiment. So, if you have questions about the Deltas, feel free to ping me.
This is such a cool tool thanks for all your hard work
Great concept - love the weather gear ;o)
So now, could be muttering 'bloody weather', when in fact for SEO's they are thinking about Google weather! Genius.
I think we could see a few videos of guest weathermen soon. Perhaps not in the nsfw 'Live TV' format though.
Great! Now, you got an app for that? lol
Cool idea!