Site Ranking Report

[columbus]

Hi guys,

My site ranking report says that I've gone from being 1-20 for a variety of keywords in Google UK to not in the top 50. When I do a search myself I see that my site remains where it previously was (between 1-20).

How reliable is the site ranking reporting on a weekly basis? Is it best to look at it monthly?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The ranking reports from Moz are generally very reliable. In fact, they've been shown to be one of the most reliable in the business.

Often when folks see a difference between Moz results and personal searching, it's because of the effects of both localization and personalization, as Brendan mentioned. In addition to his blog post, you might want to take a look at this one here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search

Here's the big question: Did your organic traffic drop? That's one of the easiest ways to verify if you've experienced a true drop in rankings.

[AdoptionHelp]

The results are accurate for the time they were checked. Rankings can fluctuate more dramatically than people would normally think. Google, for example, will move sites around in the rankings seemingly to use the performance of the site at different SERP positions to help the algorithm come up with a more accurate rank for the site.

[columbus]

Thanks, Brendan. I've tried that and I know for a fact that my results are very different from the latest ranking report I've got.

[Confetti_Wedding]

Hi Gerard,

In my experience the SEOmoz ranking report is fairly accurate. It's sometimes a few places off but it's good enough. I suspect that you're seeing personalised results which would account for the difference in rankings. To make sure that you're not seeing personalised result, add pws=0 into the URL. For example, if I search for widgets, I should see the URL as http://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&q=widgets

If you're using Chrome, I wrote a blog post about how to easily get non-personalised results.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.