Massive spike in impressions

Hey all. Not entirely sure if this is the right place for this question, but I've seen a massive spike in impressions in a single keyword — from 10k daily average impressions to a sudden spike to 4 million for a few days.

Am I right in assuming this is someone trying to pump clicks on their website, or are there other possible explanations for it? All from the US, all desktop, massive spike that shattered my CTR.

IsmTheTism said:

Am I right in assuming this is someone trying to pump clicks on their website, or are there other possible explanations for it? All from the US, all desktop, massive spike that shattered my CTR.

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hmm.... I was about to say that it sounds like a Google Discovery thing, but I think Discovery only works on mobile devices, so probably you're right that it's someone trying some CTR stuff on your page.

Either this, or there's a bug / test run by google for something (they do this a lot these days).... Also, did you get any clicks (and conversions ultimately) because of all of those impressions, or it's just impressions?

tazarbm said:

Also, did you get any clicks (and conversions ultimately) because of all of those impressions, or it's just impressions?

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It was just impressions. No discernible difference in any other metrics. Why d'you ask?

It usually happens because of bots or when Google is testing something,ff its all from US desktop and no one’s clicking,it’s probably just scraping or someone messing with clicks.Sometimes Google just shows your page more to see how it does.Its a good idea to check your logs and make sure everything looks normal,its annoying, but it usually goes away on its own soon

IsmTheTism said:

It was just impressions. No discernible difference in any other metrics. Why d'you ask?

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I don't remember why I've asked this (it's almost 3 weeks ago), but - re-reading this post - it's probably because I wanted to make sure that it's CTR manipulation or something else.

But now that you've mentioned that it's only impressions, I am almost certain it's not CTR manipulation (because CTR manipulation almost always comes with clicks), so I'm thinking that it's google testing stuff and your site got caught in the tests.

Also, according to SERT (link below), apparently there's a bug in google which causes heavy non / de-indexation of new sites, so it could also be this bug that causes the spike (highly unlikely, but unstable algos create all sorts of problems, so I'm not dismissing it yet)... Or it could also be a google update (not yet confirmed, though):

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-indexing-less-may-39538.html

Anyway, these are my theories, whether or not they're true remains to be seen...