Why is the weekly rankings report often inaccurate?

[jampaper]

Does anybody else notice that the Moz weekly rankings report are often inaccurate? Many times it says a keyword (or many keywords) fell out of the top 50, although when I manually check the keyword in a Google search, it still shows that those keywords are ranking in the top 10. I've done these manual searches with personalized search settings turned off, as well as from a completely unbiased computer.

Why is this happening? Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thank you!

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Andrew,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that your rankings are looking off in the Web App. I'm not sure why you would be getting different results in the Web App rankings than you would be getting when you run the searches yourself; it could be a lot of things. The search engines all maintain multiple indices that run across multiple datacenters. This means if you query different datacenters, you can get somewhat different ranking results. Other elements, such as personalization, geography and search history (even if you're logged out of your Google/search engine account) can also influence ranking positions. Hence, there can be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings.

Our solution has been to run searches from a variety of IP addresses and IP blocks using non-personalized, search history/location agnostic requests. In our experience, these have provided the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see, though we know there's still quite a bit of room for fluctuation.

In the meantime, I can try to see if it's a bug on our side if you can let me know...

1. The campaign that is having this issue
2. The login email address for the account that the campaign is part of
3. The keyword and URL combination that is having discrepancies
4. The ranking that you're getting in Google versus what the Web App tells you.

This way I'll be able to check it out on my side to see if it's a bug or something else. If you prefer to keep that information private, you can email it to help@moz.com Thanks so much!

Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja

[jampaper]

Are there any Moz reps out there who can confirm this??

[jampaper]

Thanks William, that seems to make sense

[William.Lau]

That is not the problem, Moz rank checker is often done at random times and at any given time a keyword could not be ranking.

I'm pretty sure Moz crawls pages with personalization off (pws=0). For instance I use to do freelance for http://www.canvaspaintings.com and they rank #1 for "canvas paintings", however sometimes they would not even appear in the top 100.

If Moz often gives the keyword the wrong ranking, you should follow up with them. If this happens maybe one or twice, it should not be a big problem. Just know that you are ranking.

[jampaper]

Our business is based out of NYC. So far I've had two people test out certain keywords from the Boston area and they see what I see (confirming that the moz report is wrong). I am going to have someone from California test those keywords out in a few hours. Thanks for the suggestion!

[William.Lau]

Moz crawls and rank checks are all done at a specific point. And then fully updated on Mon/Wed I forgot what are the days now.

Basically it checks the rankings once or twice throughout the week and if your keyword is not ranking at the time...it state it was not ranking.

Best thing to do is to rank check certain unstable keywords by using firefox or chrome addons.

[onlinechester]

I don't know if this applies to you too but I find that when my site ranks 'locally' for a phrase ie the place page is on the first page of results MOz seems to ignore it and only reports on organic listings. So I may be on the first page of Google and Moz still reports I'm not ranking or am several pages further down.