Why is my Search Console average position going down when my page is improving?

Usually because the figure isn't only about that page. For a search term, Search Console records the highest of your pages in each search and averages that across every search you appeared in. If Google sometimes shows a weaker page of yours instead of the one you're working on, those searches count at the weaker page's position. And the default view covers 90 days, so weeks from before your change are still in the number. Filter by the page and look at the last 7 days to see what the page itself is doing.

What does average position in Search Console actually measure?

The average of your site's topmost position in each search where it appeared, weighted by impressions. Looked at by search term, that can be a different page of yours from one search to the next. Looked at by page, it's that page's own position. The two answer different questions, and the default view gives you the first.

How long after a website migration should I wait before judging my rankings?

Judge the new pages, not the overall number, and judge them weekly. For a few weeks after a move Google shows some searches your old addresses and some your new ones while it catches up, and the search-term figure averages whichever it showed. Filter by your new page addresses, use a 7-day range, and compare week on week. A single summary figure is the slowest and most mixed reading you can take.

Search Console Said I Went Backwards. The Page Went Forwards.

For 6 weeks Search Console told me one of my pages was going backwards. It was going forwards the whole time. The number wasn’t broken and it wasn’t lying. It was answering a different question from the one I was asking, and after a website move that difference is at its widest at the worst possible moment.

The search I thought I was losing

The search is “website design telford”. It’s the one I most want this site to win, because it’s the town I work from and it’s typed by people who are about to spend money.

On 1 October I sent the kind of message I suspect plenty of owners have sent at some point: “frustrating that we can not make progress with the ‘website design telford’ search term.” Search Console agreed with me. Its figure for that search had slid from 22 to 30 over the summer and had sat on 30 for a month.

The page I was trying to rank had climbed from 24 to 12 over the same weeks. Both figures came out of the same account on the same morning.

Why the Search Console average position disagreed with my page

Here are the two of them, with a third line drawn between.

'website design telford': the homepage against Search Console's figure Weekly position for the homepage alone, the same week for the whole site, and the 90-day figure Search Console opens on. Week starting. The homepage climbs after the fix. The whole-site weekly figure follows it, 8 to 13 places behind. The 90-day figure keeps falling, because it's still digesting July. Google Search Console, webuildstores.co.uk, query 'website design telford', read 1 Oct 2026. Homepage: page-filtered, 7-day windows. Whole site: same windows, no page filter. 90 days: the 90 days ending each Sunday. Lower is better.

The orange line is the page I care about. The grey line is the one Search Console shows you when you open it. They touch in mid-August and then pull apart, the orange line rising while the grey one keeps falling. The dashed line between them explains why.

The number wasn’t wrong about my site. It was wrong about my page, because it was never measuring my page.

The gap between the homepage and the dashed line is pages I never meant to rank. For a search term, Search Console records the highest of your pages in each search and averages that across every search you appeared in. Most of the time the homepage was the page Google showed. But in some searches Google showed one of my other pages instead: the general website design page at 33 to 57, the Shropshire page at 37 to 88, the Telford services page at 62 to 90. Every one of those searches counted at that page’s position, and they dragged the whole-site figure 8 to 13 places below the page that was actually doing the work.

The gap between the dashed line and the grey one is time. I wrote about this half in the week-35 newsletter, so I’ll keep it short. The default view is 90 days. If you changed something in the last 2 months, most of what you’re looking at is from before the change.

Put the two together and you get the summer I had. The page climbed, and the figure I was reading couldn’t see it.

How it happened, and it was my own doing

I’d like to say this was Google being obscure. It wasn’t. I did this to myself, in 3 tidy-looking edits over the summer.

In May I gave the general website design page a title with “Website Design Telford” in it. It was a small fix to get more people clicking, and Google started showing that page for the Telford search instead of the homepage. In July I linked my Telford services page from the footer of every page on the site, with the link text Web Design Telford. In August I changed the homepage title to lead with Shopify. Each of those made sense on its own. Together they told Google that several different pages were the answer to one question, and Google did what you’d expect, which is to try them all.

The fix went in on 23 August: one page for that search, and it’s the homepage. Its title leads with the phrase again and the other pages give it back. On 1 October I finished the job by changing that footer link, which had been pointing the phrase at the wrong page from every page on the site.

The homepage has gone from 21-27 before the fix to 12-20 after it. It’s also the page Google shows now: around two-thirds of the impressions for the search in most weeks, where it used to get about a third.

Why this matters most after a website migration

Everything above happened on a site that didn’t move anywhere. A migration is the same arithmetic at a larger scale.

When you move a site, every address changes. For a few weeks afterwards Google holds 2 versions of you: the old addresses, which now redirect, and the new ones it’s still getting to know. Some searches get the old address and some get the new one, at whatever position Google gives each while it works things out. The search-term figure averages whichever it showed, and the 90-day view keeps months of the old site in the mix on top of that.

So the number is at its most mixed and its most out of date in the weeks straight after the move. That’s exactly when you open Search Console, see a line heading the wrong way, and start asking whether the move was a mistake, or whether the person who did it knew what they were doing.

What I’ve measured here is a page consolidation on my own site, not a client migration. The migration case runs on the same mechanism, but I haven’t measured it on a client move yet. What I said in Website Migration SEO still stands, that a move done properly is a wobble rather than a loss. The point here is that the default view is a poor instrument for telling the two apart.

How to check a page’s real position in Search Console

It takes about 2 minutes in Search Console.

Open Performance and filter by the page you care about, not just the search term. Add a Page filter with the exact address, and the figure becomes that page’s own position.
Change the date range to the last 7 days, and compare it with the 7 days before. A change shows up week on week long before it shows up in 90 days.
Then take the page filter off, keep the search term, and switch to the Pages tab. Every page listed there is one Google tried for that search. If there’s more than one, some of your searches are counting at the wrong page’s position, and that’s a problem you can fix.

Judge the page you meant by the week, not the search by the quarter.

What I still haven’t won

None of this turns page two into page one. The homepage’s best week was 12, and its last week was 19. Over the 10 weeks in the chart the search brought 4 clicks in total, because position 12 is still the second page, and the second page earns almost nothing. On the day this went up, the footer fix had been live for a few hours. Whether it pushes the homepage onto the first page is something I’ll know in a fortnight.

What I’ve won is the right to stop being frustrated with the wrong thing.

I’d set myself a check for 14 days after the fix, and I never ran it. So for 6 weeks I was annoyed with a number that couldn’t see the work, while the one that could was a single filter away.

If you’ve moved your site recently, or you’re about to, and the numbers have you worried, send me the address. I’ll tell you which number to read before you decide anything. And if the move hasn’t happened yet, here’s how I handle a Shopify migration.