Is the keyword ranking number used for MOZ Pro an average position taken across the time period?

[Laurie-Tomahawk]

Hi there

I am just trying to confirm how the ranking given in the 'rankings' report is calculated (an average etc).

Thanks

Sarah

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Sarah,

No, it's the position that the Moz crawlers found your keyword for on the search engine result page. So it's not an average.

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Sarah,

If you are seeing a discrepancy between where Moz says you are ranking vs what you are seeing when you perform a search, it is because Moz tries to represent the ranking "most" users would see.

Here are some factors that can cause discrepancies found at Moz.com/Help:

Why do the rankings in SEOmoz not match what I see in Google?
Great question! Although there is never one “right” ranking for any keyword, SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see. If you see wildly different results from your search engine compared to your Ranking Report, it could be because of the following reasons:

• Personalization – Most search engines will personalize your results based on your search history. Make sure you are logged out when performing a search. For Google, try adding &pws=0 to the end of your query string.

  For example, if you searched for “SEO” the URL in Google would look like google.com/search?q=SEO. To turn off personalization, append &pws=0 to the end, so it would look like google.com/search?q=SEO&pws=0.

  

• Geographic Bias – Search engines also customize results based on location. This means users in one city often see very different results than users in another location.

• Latency – Rankings can change between the time we retrieve them and the day when they are viewed.

• “www” vs. non-“www” Subdomains – The Web App is subdomain specific, meaning it only tracks rankings for the specific subdomain you track. So if you enter “example.com” as your subdomain, but “www.subdomain.com” is what ranks in the search results, this ranking won’t appear in your rankings report. This also might indicate a problem with canonicalization or duplicate content.

  If you set your campaign up on the wrong subdomain, the only way to correct it is to start a new campaign. You can either archive or delete your old campaign, or choose to keep it running if you have enough campaign slots available.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[Laurie-Tomahawk]

Hi Martijn

Thanks for your response. So, it's a one-time result for each crawl? Doesn't seem very reliable to me...