Why my keyword is showing 30 average position on search console but isn't showing in top 100 in google?

Question

When I go to google search console, I see the average position of one of my keywords at 30th, but when I manually search for that keyword in that specific area my keyword is not on even 100th position. Why is it happening? How can I solve it?

Answer 1

Google Search Console reports the average position for when your site shows up in the search results at all. When you site doesn't even appear in the search results for a query it doesn't bring the average position down.

So if your page is sometimes listed on page 3 of the search results when somebody navigates to it, but most of the time isn't in the search results at all, the average position is still going to be reported as in the thirties.

Google's results are not static. They are different for:

• Different users (based on personalization)
• Different locations (geo customization)
• Randomly or over short time periods (A/B testing or trying a result out in a position, known as "tasting")

In other words, just because you can't see your site in the results, it doesn't mean that it isn't there for everybody or hasn't been there at all. Since Average Position doesn't take into account times when it is missing altogether, it appears inflated.