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Is Google Search Console giving False Information?
Posted by on January 23, 2023 at 3:24 amWhy is that in Performance Reports GSC says my website is ranking for a query but when I manually search for it in google, my website is nowhere to be found in the serps.
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1 Reply
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It’s showing average position
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Is it for a particular country or device type? Try using some of those filters to see if there’s more data.
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It happens sometimes.
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[deleted]
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Pretty sure GSC data lags. Use SEMrush or ahrefs for more accurate position tracking of keywords/pages that rank.
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Here’s my opinion on this, I also used to get frustrated. 99% of the time it works, but sometimes I believe that the search is highly localised to a particular region within your ranking country, which is why even if you search (in Incognito mode I hope) you may not find the ranking keyword, you may need to be in Cape Town, as opposed to Johannesburg.
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It will count your ranking from image, twitter carousel, etc . That will skew the positions in most cases.
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For more precise position tracking of ranked keywords and pages, try SEMrush or Ahrefs.
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You might be ranking via a PAA Question or an Image Pack.
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TL;DR if the keyword is “gibberish” the SERP will be non-sensical and highly volatile.
In one of the other replies you say the query is “gibberish” and irrelevant. It is most likely that the SERP generated was for that query at the time it was searched. Established sensical meaningful keywords have a SERP that has been generated previously. That same SERP is served and tweaked by the algo over time. A brand new query with complete gibberish keywords is most likely going to return nonsense until it is deemed high-volume enough for the algo to begin making sense of it and ranking relevant items.
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average position from a sample. Keep in mind that search personalization can have a massive impact on what any given person sees in search results.
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This happens sometimes to me as well. Remember to filter in which country you want to see your rankings.
Aslo, I recommend using a SERP simulator for instance Nightwatch Search Simulator. It’s free, more anonmyous & allows you to search a query in many countries
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The data shown on GSC and tools like Semrush never matches. Don’t know which one to trust. Which one is more reliable?
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One of the things to consider, is that if the click volume is very low (esp if click + impr are low but esp if the daily click volume is low – e.g. <90 per month) – then google will clump similar keywords and extract the “one-off” long tail elements (for “privacy”).
You can test this by narrowing the data field using query, page or date filters and slowly watch the query data dissappear.
So, if GSC reports that for a time frame (even 3 months) – that you had a click at position 5 (page 1) for “Rolex” – it could have have included long tail search (that had a position 5) that changed the overall average and its choosing not to show it.
How can be privacy be compromised by search? Lets say someone did a search like “DUI for Justin Timberlandslake” and then filled in a form. If that page was connected to an identifying mechanism page (e.g. a web form, an account on that site etc) – you could tie personal information to a that person etc etc.
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