SEO professionals around the world woke up this morning and looked at the organic search positioning for their websites and gasped in horror. It appears that every website in the world saw its average position shoot up (to an average of less-than-or-equal-to 10) while impressions and clicks plummeted. While good positions are… well, good, it’s not good to have your visibility and actual website traffic dive off a cliff.
As it turns out, third-party tracking tools are just suffering from Google removing a helpful function in the search results page that allows them to see the whole of the first 100 results at once. Essentially, if you added &num=100 to the URL for the search results, it would deliver 100 results. That’s now been removed and if you want to see what lies beyond the first page of results, you have to use Google’s pagination and look at the results ten at a time. Because of this, the only results being returned are those appearing on the first page of the search results.
It was initially considered that this was a not-so-subtle cash grab by Google since third-party tools pay for the privilege each time they retrieve search results, and this just increased how often they need to retrieve search results by a factor of 10. However, it seems that may not be the case, since Google managed to break their own reporting systems at the same time.
Google Search Console, the tool used by most professionals to review what Google wants to tell us about organic search performance, is suffering from the same problem. A check today shows that every single website we manage is affected. Google have broken the one tool they want us to use to improve their search engine.
In their typical style of being considerate of the concerns and needs of the SEO community, Google’s official Search Console social media accounts immediately went on the offensive by posting about the new achievements they have added. Because getting another 1,000 clicks per 28 days is vital when your report has suddenly lost a few thousand clicks.
While that’s not helpful, Google are likely to fix this. Whether they do it quickly and restore the data they’ve lost is another question, and we simply won’t know. This is going to be one case where your Analytics data (flaky and unreliable though that is at the best of times) is going to be more valuable than the Search Console data.
