Webmasters may have had a moment of panic in the days after Google made an update to the way impressions and average position are reported in the Google Search Console interface.
Quite a few of our clients at Merkle saw significant drops in average position after the update, like this one:
Once Google confirmed the July 13 update and added it to their Search Console Data Anomalies page, there wasn’t much to go on when trying to determine exactly what happened. The update was described as such:
An incremental improvement in Google’s logging system now provides better accounting for results in lower positions…
This leaves a lot to be desired when searching for answers to what changes really occurred and why our reports are now so much different.
In this article, we explore one of the changes in our clients’ Search Console data that might explain at least part of why the change was so drastic.
What really happened?
Given that the GSC interface is limited to only export 1,000 rows per report, we turned to the Search Analytics API, which allows us to pull a more complete data set and get a better look at where the drop in average position is coming from.
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