Rankings confusion in pro campaign

[kbaltzell]

Hello Moz-world!

I recently set up a new campaign, and the crawl is still in the process of wrapping up (been 4 days). When I look at my rankings it tells me "not in the top 50" then when I scroll over, it shows me that my client is ranking in position 3, in the instance of one keyword.

Anyone know why there is a discrepancy between what the report shows, and what it shows when you mouse over the rankings?

Thanks!

Tyler

[Peterli]

Hey Tyler!

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 - Google, Yahoo! & Bing - 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. If you have suggestions about how we might improve the technical process of fetching rankings data to get better data, please let us know and we'll pass it on to our engineering team. We're always looking for ways to get you better data.

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 keyword and URL combination that is having discrepancies
3. The ranking that you're getting in Google versus what the Web App tells you.

Or if you are not comfortable with giving that info out, you can certainly include that in an email with a description of your issue to help@seomoz.org.

Hope that helps!  Let me know if you have any questions!

Best,

Peter
SEOmoz Help Team.

[kbaltzell]

Thanks for getting back to me Peter. I think that my question didn't come out clear, sorry! I've attached an image of the issue I'm seeing.

Basically, SEOMoz gives one ranking, then tells me another when I hover over the local dot. I didn't mean there was a discrepancy between what SEOMoz gives, and what  I find when running queries.

Maybe the picture will better demonstrate. Sorry, I removed the names because this is for a client.

Thanks again,

Tyler

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