Google announced yesterday that they were making changes to how the search queries data in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is being reported.
One of the pet peeves I had with this data historically was that the “average position” for keywords on my SEO campaigns was out of sync with what I was seeing. There are a number of keywords I monitor a lot in the rankings and as such know where these rankings are on a day by day basis and whenever I’ve looked in GWT these average rankings have been considerably lower than the positions I know have been the average position over a given time frame. This is incredibly annoying when trying to use this data and has previously given me pause when looking at the accuracy of this data. I also know that other people have looked at this data and been concerned as they were sure that a keyword was doing well in Google only to see this report and think it’s not doing as well as they thought it was.
On the Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday there was an announcement about changes to this report and an explanation about how this used to work and how it works now.
Previously the rankings shown in this report were based on the average ranking for the whole site, this means that if you have multiple rankings for a given keyword your average ranking would be lower than the main ranking you’ve achieved. For example, if your site ranks 3rd for a keyword and also ranks 14th, these two rankings would be combined to show the average ranking for the keywords.
However, from the 25th January 2012 Google will now be showing this average ranking figure based on the top ranking for a keyword, so only your position 3 ranking will be used to create the average ranking.
This will not affect the historical data and so the old method of working out the average ranking will still apply for all reports on searches and keywords which report time frames before the 25th January. However, from yesterday all the data you will see in GWT will be based on the highest of your rankings, which will then better reflect the positions you see. Great for making sure you don’t have a heart attack when looking at this data as it’s telling you that your average position is 9th when you thought you were 3rd!
