9 things you might not know about Google Search Console data

If you wrestle daily with Google Search Console, here are some facts you should be aware of shared by Andrew Charlton. Hopefully, they’ll shed some light on the data that Google Search Console shows you:

• The position of an URL in the SERP is only recorded when an impression is generated.
• If you only operate in one country, your data will be skewed by default. Filter your data by country.
• The position of an URL is calculated on the left (primary side) top-to-bottom and then on the right side.
• If more than one page ranks for the same query, Search Console records the best rank. And when it averages the position, it aggregates data from the best position across multiple queries.
• If there are elements like a knowledge panel with multiple links, they'll all be recorded as the same position. This approximation can be misleading.
• On the landing page report, Google aggregates landing page data by the canonical URL. This means there can be a discrepancy with Google Analytics.
• When you implement a lot of new pages, your average position can go up as new pages rank higher.
• Since Google removes rare queries from the table data, clicks aggregated in the chart totals are different from the clicks summed by all queries in the table.
• If you filter queries by “containing”, anonymized queries will be removed from chart totals. This makes it difficult to get absolute values for defining brand vs non-brand data.

Did you find something new among these?

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Position is the most misleading element in GSC report. Most people consider it as exact position for main keyword while it's the average of all keywords (for a specific page).