What does this Google Webmaster Tools data mean?

I am the first to admit when I don’t know something. Alright, I’m not. I probably try to cover up it. But instead of claiming that there is something wrong with something (eg the google keywords tool), I’m going to ask who can explain this data to me.

Here’s a screenshot showing “impressions” for my blog – that’s the number of times my blog appeared in search results for any queries – from June 18 to July 18. The data is what Google shows you in its Webmaster Tools service.

As you can see, I was trundling along at nearly 50,000 a day, nearly wholly driven by people searching for “Youtube UK” and my post on the demographics of UK Youtube users appearing in position 6 to 10. Then the number of impressions falls off a cliff:

Impression data, June to July

Staring at specific days, here’s June 20th. As you can see my bog appeared in position 6 to 10 of Google’s results 40,500 times that day for a search on “Youtube UK”.

Data for July 12

If we use Google Insights, we can see that there hasn’t been a significant fall in searches.

Searches for “Youtube UK”

So what explains the wierd data …? If the searches for that term haven’t collapsed, why have the impressions?

I don’t really care – I get no benefit from it. I just want to know what the hell’s going in …!

Update

So one of the reasons for the graphs above is that the second one is for “you tube uk” and not “youtube uk”. Oops. So here’s the correct data for “youtube uk” on July 12″:

July 12 correct data

Here’s the overall data for 21 June to 26 July:

Overall data – 21 June to 26 July – high, low, high again

And here’s the data for 26 July:

Youtube UK searches – I’m back …

Now on July 12th, it only appears 260 times in that position.Youtube UK searches – I’m back …

Who knows what all this means – the search volumes haven’t gone anywhere. But in the middle, I stopped appearing for the thousands of “youtube uk” search term and then I came back again. Odd.

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