Ahrefs says it is deleting bad rank tracking data
A statement shared by Glenn Gabe says past affected results are being cleaned up, but nobody has said yet whether old charts get fixed.
Ahrefs has put out a statement about Google serving bad results to tracking tools, and it says it is already throwing out the junk. The statement was posted by Glenn Gabe, who said it covers both the poisoning of the search results and the wider tracking problems the tool has been facing.
We're also cleaning up any past results that may have been affected.
We already have multiple filters in place to detect and reject the abnormal results and request accurate replacements.
In the statement, Ahrefs says it has "multiple filters in place to detect and reject the abnormal results and request accurate replacements", and that it is also cleaning up past results that may have been affected.
Why this matters to you
A rank tracker is a tool that checks, every day, where your site sits in Google for the words you care about. If the results it collects are wrong, the chart it draws is wrong too. That is the problem we covered earlier, when reports came out that Google was serving fake results to these tools.
So a drop in your rankings chart might be a real drop, or it might be a bad reading that the tool has now agreed was bad.
The part nobody has answered yet
Filtering out bad results going forward is one thing. Fixing the charts you already looked at is another. Gabe said he followed up with Ahrefs to ask exactly that, whether historical graphs will be updated based on the cleanup, and whether drops and surges that were not accurate will be changed. He said "Stay tuned", which means there is no answer yet.
Until there is, assume the odd spike or dip in your older rank history could be noise rather than something you did. Ahrefs is not alone here. Barry Schwartz said he added this statement to his story alongside other statements from these tools, so more than one tracker has been dealing with the same thing.
What to do
If you saw a sharp, unexplained ranking drop in your tracker recently, do not rebuild your site around it. Cross check it by hand. Open Google Search Console, click Performance, then Search results, and look at the average position for the same keyword over the same dates. Search Console gets its numbers from Google itself rather than from a tool scraping results, so it is not affected by this.
If Search Console shows your clicks and average position holding steady, the drop in your tracker was probably never real. If it shows the same decline, then you have something worth looking into.
For most small business owners the right move right now is to wait. The tools are fixing their own data. You do not need to do anything to your website because of this.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.