Why Webmaster tools shows different avg. positions?

[EzgiGunyel-InfinPixels]

Hi everyone, I am new to Seomoz, I loved this amazing SEO school

My questions is about webmaster tool.

Webmaster tool shows that my site's avg. positions is 34 and its getting better every week. I even see some new queries, new avg. positions for that queries. That's great !

But when I search the avg position it is between 54 -60  and I don't see any new queries . Shouldnt we rely on what webmaster tells us about avg. positions?

Thanks a lot

[BenFox]

Welcome to Q+A,

The avg positions in webmaster tools aren't very reliable. They look at data from all searches and can be influenced by personalization and localization. This means that your "true" position (position with personalization turned off) can be very different from your average position which is an aggregate of all of the data.

I tend to see that my average ranking is lower than my "true" ranking so if I were you I would just check that I'm removing personalization from the search. You can either open up a private browsing session (anonymous browsing if you're using Chrome) or add &pws=0 onto the end of an existing URL query string. In the example below I've highlighted where you would add this in.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=example**&pws=0**