Having a debate among SEOs at my company now around what actually c...

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Noah

Jan 19, 2025, 11:00 AM

Forwarded thread from another channel:

Dylan Jones

Nov 7, 2024, 11:52 AM

Having a debate among SEOs at my company now around what actually counts as an impression. We have different understandings of what an impression in GSC is, most likely due to vague documentation and differences in how we learned them.

How do you define an impression?

1. A link must be seen or scrolled into view to count as an impression

2. Any link in the top 100 results of a query will be counted as an impression, regardless of whether a user sees it or not

Here is the relevant . Let me know what you guys think because this is challenging everything I know about GSC and I'm spinning out.

Jared McKiernan

Nov 7, 2024, 11:57 AM

Here's a screenshot from a client of mine, which is representative of pretty much every site I've ever worked on.

While the Google documentation aligns with #1...these numbers don't make sense for any site I've ever worked on. Is it feasible that even 10% of people scroll such that "page 2" is in their view? I don't think so, but to get an average position of >20, the percentage scrolling to page 2+ would have to be much higher than this.

Dylan Jones

Nov 7, 2024, 12:00 PM

That's the way that I've looked at it as well

Jared McKiernan

Nov 7, 2024, 12:00 PM

Another example, in this case an NFL team. They have a massive amount of branded/news searches...there is no way possible their average position of people who actually see the link could be >10.

Andy Strager

Nov 7, 2024, 12:12 PM

I think the best argument to make for #2 is when Google went back to standard pagination from infinite scroll and there wasn't a free fall of impressions.

Yeah we assume #2

Cool, glad to know that I'm not the only one that leans towards #2, haha

Kyle Enfield

Nov 8, 2024, 11:06 AM

@Jared McKiernan do you think that may be more of an avg. position vs. true rank thing? i.e. a link in the knowledge panel is going to drag average position down since it's (allegedly) being classified as a lower position?

Derek Perkins

Nov 8, 2024, 11:13 AM

I've wondered the same thing. The little image shows "6", but what if that is "11" or "101" instead, depending on page size

Jared McKiernan

Nov 8, 2024, 11:55 AM

@Kyle Enfield I don’t think so because if you isolate queries that show those it never reports such a high number. This would apply to most branded queries where you’d have the homepage and a big KP ranking