Rank trackers describe how they check suspect Google results, what customers see during checks, and what they say about reprocessing and past results.

SEO tool maker Ahrefs said Thursday that it’s “cleaning up any past results that may have been affected” by what it calls the “poisoning” of search results by Google, in which suspected SERP data providers are shown different results. Its post doesn’t say which dates, reports or metrics the cleanup covers.

Agency SEO platform SEOmonitor says in its help center that between Oct. 9 and 13, “some of the incorrect results were recorded in the platform” and that the affected keywords were reprocessed on Oct. 13, the day it put a new check in place.

Three other companies (AccuRanker, BrightLocal and SerpApi) have also described how each of them treats these results. These descriptions are side-by-side so you can see how each company describes the steps taken for an individual rank before storing that data, when displaying it to users and after recording it. A tool’s actions at each step during the weeks these vendors describe can affect what is said in your reports.

An Oct. 10 article by rank-tracking company Nozzle looked at how Google’s results pages were showing up without many (or sometimes all) of the sites that normally show up for a particular search term. The Nozzle article was updated on Oct. 21. Roger Montti covered the original article on Oct. 14.

When determining if a result is poisoned, Nozzle’s first page poisoned count includes it if less than 50 percent of the normal first page sites for a keyword show up anywhere within the collected results.

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