Huge fluctuation reported by GSC for US Desktop for one keyword

[sandiego-seo]

Hi,

I'm seeing a huge rank fluctuation reported by GSC (all rank trackers reported stable rank) for one of our pages, one particular keyword, in one particular country (US), and only Desktop (not Mobile). Is anyone else encountering a similar case?

More details:

1. huge rank fluctuation reported by GSC in the US, stable in other countries (since Oct 7th)

2. all rank tracking service reported stable top rank in US cities (as well as our own friend's testing across the country)

3. only happen to 1 keyword and its close variation (other keywords that the page also ranks for are quite stable)

4. only observed fluctuation for Desktop, while Mobile is stable

5. in those low-ranked days, the average CTR is only slightly lower than normal days

Does anyone have any idea what could this be?  Should I trust GSC's fluctuation or the rank tracking service's stable top rank?

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[seotoolshero024]

Hey Alex,

I couldn't find any method there, you just put some random link to any website. Please don't spread some fake information.

Thanks

[beingeconomist1]

Hello,

Yes this fluctuations seems due to the recent changes in Google algorithm, May be this is also happening because of this change.

[effectdigital]

Basically, if you identify a data anomaly you shouldn't trust any of the stats (as a group). Generally GSC (Google Search Console) can be trusted, but if you have identified an issue you should question the whole dataset

[sandiego-seo]

Right I hope it's a bug from GSC, since all the rank tracker and our own testing couldn't agree with what the GSC reports.  A related question - assuming that the average position reported by GSC is not correct in this case, how much should I trust the #impressions and #clicks data?

[effectdigital]

Actually I think that GSC still reports on granular keywords. The reason I think this is that, some keywords which Google's keyword planner merges (as they are similar) still show as distinct in Search Console. What you are saying is possible, but I don't think there's enough evidence to conclusively state such an opinion at this juncture. If your rank tracker starts to mirror what GSC is seeing, I would be more concerned. GSC is known to regularly experience bugs for its performance-related metrics, e.g: https://searchengineland.com/bug-in-google-search-console-performance-reports-impact-google-discover-reporting-326487

You can also check here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211453?hl=en#search_analytics

[sandiego-seo]

Thank you. Did you see it fluctuates on rank trackers as well or was it just GSC?

[sai98]

It happed to me, This may got hit by previous google update.

Regards.!

[sandiego-seo]

Thank you for the info! The GSC does look quite reasonable for many other keywords I am examing and is consistent with rank trackers. But for this particular keyword, it has been reporting fluctuation since 2 months ago, and we couldn't figure out why. The graph image shall at most affect the rank number by 1 or 2 at most - which doesn't explain the huge fluctuation. 

I have a guess - would it be possible that, because of the BERT update, GSC converts some long-tail keywords into this short-term keyword, and if our page's rank is low for that long tail, the reported average rank is affected?

[effectdigital]

I would personally be more willing to trust in your rank tracker as it's independent data and you know how it works. With GSC in particular, you can have things like a knowledge graph image being hot-linked (by Google) counting as a ranking when actually no one can visit your site through it. For ranking data GSC can be very 'iffy' indeed