Google: Search Console Ranking Data Anomalies Explained

On today’s Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, a question was why the Search Console shows you are ranking for a particular term, but when you search for that term in Google, your website is nowhere to be seen.

What the person is saying is that using the example above, the term “Best Host News” ranks as number one in Google in the search console, but when you click on the “Link to the SERPs,” the website is nowhere to be seen.

You can access this screen from your Search Console and select Search Traffic -> Search Analytics in the side menu. Then select the “Position” option at the top of the page.

The question is easier to demonstrate via a screenshot:

John Mueller, a webmaster trends analyst, explained that “they don’t make it up, and that it is essentially data that they have seen.”. He went on to give a couple of examples of what may cause the search results not reflect the data in the Search Console:

• Personalization — i.e., location of the user, search settings. John Mueller recommends looking at the number of impressions for that query. For example, if the number of search queries for that term is high, but the number of impressions is low, that could indicate it is a personalization issue.
• Universal Search Results — i.e., where they show images at the top of page one on Google. This may be relevant where your web page is not ranked highly in Google for that term, but the Universal Search Results may show an image from your website related to that term. Images are counted as an impression \ ranking for the Search Console data.

Mueller is saying that the Search Console rankings and impressions take into account much more than just the standard Web SERPs.

The discussion surrounding this topic occurred at time 0:36:

Later in the hangout, the subject came up again. The example discussed related to a high traffic keyword “experience days” that was an exact match of the domain. Despite many people searching for that term, the website experienced a very low click-through rate.

It could be due to “autocomplete” taking users directly to the domain, instead of the search result. Mueller stated that they “only count it as a search if the website is shown on the search results page.”

Mueller suspects that they are probably clicking on something else that is not counted, such as:

• Adverts
• Knowledge Graph sidebar links

Mueller could not determine in this instance what may be causing the discrepancy, but if this kind of problem occurs for you, it is worth checking from different locales to try and see what users see, as this may help troubleshoot the problem.

The discussion on this point occurred at time 26:26: