In the Q&A portion of John Mueller’s hangout on 09/17/2021, one webmaster was concerned about Search Console being inaccurate in rankings.
The webmaster was curious about which is right—Search Console checks rankings, or they don’t rank at all.
John explained that Search Console does not invent rankings. In fact, it uses real-world data based on what people saw in the search results.
He also explained that sometimes, the search results can be really hard to figure out in terms of where your page is actually being shown. Also, these rankings can change over time.
The question and answer happen at around the 39:08 mark in the video.
John Mueller 09/17/2021 Hangout Transcript
We’re having multiple issues on our site where Search Console says we’re ranking for keywords. But when we check the rankings, we don’t rank at all. What might be the cause of this and which is right?
John 39:19 (Answer)
So Search Console does not invent rankings, it’s not a theoretical ranking report that we show in Search Console, it is based on what people actually saw. So from that point of view, the data that you see in Search Console when it’s there is based on what was actually visible in the search results. However, sometimes the search results can be really hard to figure out in terms of where your page is being shown. And sometimes these things change over time. So usually what I try to do when I look at things like our blog and wonder like why does this page get so much traffic for this weird keyword is I’ll try to figure out what the most specific setting is where this pattern is visible in the report.
That means picking out the individual country where it’s most visible, maybe the type of page where it’s most visible, and the type of search result where it’s most visible. And then also looking at the graph to see, is this something that was maybe a one-time spike? Or is it something that is consistently at that level? And if it was a one-time spike, then it might be that I can’t just reproduce it anymore. If it’s consistently at that level, then it feels like there’s a chance that if I search with those settings, I could see that as well. It’s not always guaranteed, but it’s that there’s at least a small chance there.
And, in particular, when you’re looking at the normal web search results in the performance report, we also include things like the image’s one box or the knowledge panel on the side. And the map’s one box, for example, if that’s visible somewhere. All of these things can count as impressions as well. So you really need to take a look at the whole page. And especially with the image’s one box, it’s sometimes a little bit surprising when you finally find a link to your site in there. But from our point of view, that’s also an impression on the search results page.
The other thing that can happen is that sometimes the search results are very personalized and it can happen that for a query that has usually a fairly high search volume, that maybe it’s a really small portion of those people see something that would show your website. And that’s usually a little bit harder to try to figure out. But you can kind of guess at that if you look at the queries, and you think, “Oh, this is a very popular query, probably. But my website is getting very little and very few impressions for this query.” Then it’s possible that the majority of the people who are searching for this actually don’t see your website, and only a very small portion of people would see your website.
And then that could be the case where maybe there’s something happening with personalization or something else that’s playing a role here where suddenly these links are all social. So those are kind of the different ways I would try to narrow that down.
