Moz reporting incorrect ranking

[SpearOne]

Moz is reporting no ranking on one of my keywords, but when  I search that keyword on Google we are on the first page.  What would cause Moz to report that incorrectly?

[GTGshops]

Hi Theresa,

Are you sure that you have search history turned off in your google account ?

[GeorgeAndrews]

Hello Theresa,

There could be many reasons Moz is reporting a different ranking than what you see. First, have you already confirmed you are not receiving personalized results when you search for this phrase? Cyrus Shepard provides a method for un-personalizing Google Search in this post.

Also, here's another related question with some tips.

[SpearOne]

Yes, it's off.  Any other reasons you can think of?  Thanks

[Kingof5]

Not sure what causes this, but for our sites, it's been common to see some discrepancies in Moz's keyword ranking tool. It's not 100% right, but I'd say it's at least 90%. I see some that are off by one position but I've occasionally seen rankings off by 30+ positions.

[Peterli]

Hi Theresa,

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 us know by emailing help@moz.com and provide...

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. Thanks so much!

Hope that helps!

Peter
Moz help team.