New Sitemap Feature

Average Top Position

[thecityofgold2005]

Just noticed a new feature on my sitemaps, giving average top position for the top 20 search queries / clicks.

Looks useful.

[suzie250]

I just saw that this morning too. I think it's pretty cool. You'll be able to tell how your site is doing from day to day.

[abates]

The same search term has one average position in the queries column and a slightly different one on the clicks column. I'm assuming that's because one is based on the position every time the term was searched on and the other from only the times when it was clicked?

[rebelde]

I'm confused by the "average top position" in the "top query clicks" column, too.

The idea that you get more clicks when listed #2 when you rank #1 in the SERPs on average doesn't make sense to me.

Any ideas?

[BillyS]

>>The idea that you get more clicks when listed #2 when you rank #1 in the SERPs on average doesn't make sense to me.

I can think of two reasons this can happen.

1. - The snippet showing in the results where your ranking for #2 is more attractive to the user so they click it more frequently. (Or the snippet for the #1 spot is less attractive).

2. - You can be #25 on a very popular search term and get more clicks than #1 on an less popular (obscure) search term.

[vitaplease]

The top search queries could give the country/language version of Google on which this most occurs.

At the moment, if I click through, it always goes to google.com...hl=en_GB , often you cannot find your own url in English results with foreign language content.

[stu_uk]

yep, very useful tool

helped me to better optimise a page that was ranking very well but not getting many clicks.