Whether you’re a content producer, SEO specialist, marketing manager, or even just a humble journalist, there’s a chance you saw something in the past week on Search Console that made you flinch: your impressions went down. Way down.
Almost a week ago, Google made a change to its search engine rules that affected everything: in one hit, the search engine turned off listing of 100 results at the same time.
You probably don’t search with anything more than ten, and the number is probably fewer than that, but you’re not the target; search engine monitoring tools are. Systems like Ahrefs and SEMRush, and a whole swathe of keyword monitoring tools work by loading the first 100 results for a query, and logging the information accordingly.
These ranks determine the position of your keywords, terms, and phrases in the top 10 pages of search covering 100 results positions, and can provide an indication of how you’re improving, or more importantly if you’re improving.
But there’s also a problem: the impressions are a little fraudulent.
Not only are very few searches that far back in their search, these results are also skewing your average position, because it’s increasing what constitutes an average. More positions no one is seeing means a different average, and so your data might not have been legit.
A change for the better (or worse)
Search monitoring tools won’t like it, but as a search specialist, this guy does. Not necessarily because it makes tracking more complex, or even because it makes reporting problematic (SEO teams may have greater difficulty showing improvements).
I like the change because it means data in Google’s Search Console is now a lot more accurate.
It also confirms a long suspicion: that search marketing tools may have contributed to some of the weird numbers in results, particularly when position and CTR don’t always change the way they’re expected following on from work.
What this change means
Google’s change means those 100 results pages are turned off and search monitoring tools have to try something else.
While they’re working on that, your search console should have started showing a change:
Your impressions will go down, and your average position should conversely go up.
It won’t be an immediate spike, but you should see that happen in your result. And if one happens but not the other – or if your traffic drops completely – you probably are in need of an SEO audit, and some extra love and care from your friendly neighbourhood holistic SEO specialist team.
