Is search console lying to me about rankings?

[Frog]

Hi - I have a really strange one.
I suspected my site was over optimized for a term and I spent some time toning it down, when I search for the term there does not seem to be much movement just bouncing around between places 40-45ish, however, search console has reported a huge jump. It shows the average for the last week as position 12 but ahrefs tracker and serped trackers both have the site still in position 40+.

Search console is also reporting an all time high of impressions but again traffic hasnt jumped much yet.

Does this add up? has anyone seen anything like this before?

 

[bernard]

Yes, I've seen this quite often, where ranktracking reports one and Search Console something else. Can't help with why unfortunately.

 

[CCarter]

Search console is also reporting an all time high of impressions but again traffic hasnt jumped much yet.

I don't have a search console account, but I believe Search Console report averages, where as rank trackers report the exact position of the result when the result was pulled. It will vary throughout the day, but if search console is giving an average, that's got to be against the amount of impressions it's creating the average for.

Either way if there is no traffic jump on your end - then there is no traffic. So neither matter.

 

[Darth]

I also believe that, in the last month or so at least, Google is showing very different SERP rankings in different trackers vs GSC vs actual Google SERPs, etc.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Search Console absolutely shows some kind of rolling averages and probably based on certain "representative" data centers. What they report can be wildly different from what you and other rank trackers are seeing, which will all be different from one another too. There's always bounces, split tests, and connecting to different shards which data is still propagating out to.

If you look at Search Console versus Google Analytics you'll see fairly big discrepancies too. There's no definitive version of the SERPs or even data related to it any more.