Huge fluctuation reported by GSC for US Desktop for one keyword

[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

[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?

[alexmurphy1122]

This post is deleted!

[sai98]

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

Regards.!

[sandiego-seo]

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

[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]

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]

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

[beingeconomist1]

Hello,

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

[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