If you are trying to understand your ranking position, or other Google search metrics, in Google Search right now, you might see some confusing, inaccurate or different data. Both Google Search Console’s reporting and many of the third-party Google Search tracking tools seem to be struggling with reporting on organic ranking data since late last week.
What changed. Late last week, Google dropped the ability to show a hundred search results per page. This poses a challenge for most third-party rank checking tools, because many of them were able to get 100 search results on a single query, but now it costs them 10 times as much to get the same data.
Adding the &num=100 parameter to the search results URL in on Google.com does not add 100 results per page anymore.
Impact of third-party tracking tools. With that, most of the third-party tracking tools will need to make changes to how they track beyond the first page of the Google Search results. Many tools have already confirmed that there are issues and they are working on workarounds. Some tools have not yet confirmed the issue but you can tell, when you look at the reporting, the data is missing or seems very off.
I covered some of those in more detail on the Search Engine Roundtable.
Google Search Console data off. Many are also noticing that the data in Google Search Console’s performance reports also seems off. Brodie Clark reported, and others, that there is a significant decline in desktop impressions, resulting in a sharp increase in average position. Brodie Clark wrote, “Either way, if you’ve just checked GSC and are noticing a significant drop to overall impressions in the past couple of days of data, you’re not alone.”
Brodie Clark shared this chart:
Why we care. I am trying to get more details from Google on why the 100 search results per page parameter was removed. Is it a bug, was it an intentional feature removal or something else.
I am also trying to get more clarity on the Search Console data reporting change. It doesn’t make sense to me why the 100 parameter change would result in this, outside of Brodie Clark’s theory on scrapers causing a mess with our data for years.
In any event, keep this in mind when you review your organic search data this week.