It used to be very easy to manually check your website rankings up to the first 100 positions.
You would go into your Google search settings on your computer and increase the results per page from 10 to 100. Then in a single search you could determine if your website was in the top 100 and where it ranked. To find your site use the “find” function to find your domain.
Google now delivers more results for a domain with your SERP page set to 100 results. This means that a #5 result when set to 10 results per page becomes #13 with 100 results. This is the case in the example below.
Search phrase: vancouver wa nursery
10 results per page
[1] => https://www.shortysgardenandhome.com/
[2] => https://linktown.kgw.com/nursery/vancouver/wa
[3] => https://www.dexknows.com/local/home_and…/nurseries/…/c-vancouver-wa/
[4] => https://local.yahoo.com/WA/Vancouver/Home…/Nurseries+Greenhouses
[5] => https://www.northwestnurseryoutlet.com/
[6] => https://www.dexknows.com/local/home_and_garden/nurseries/geo/c-vancouver-wa/
100 results per page
[1] => https://www.shortysgardenandhome.com/
[2] => https://www.shortysgardenandhome.com/?cid=998
[3] => https://linktown.kgw.com/nursery/vancouver/wa
[4] => https://linktown.kgw.com/biz/tran-nursery/vancouver/wa/98661/9494727
[5] => https://www.dexknows.com/local/home_and…/nurseries/…/c-vancouver-wa/
[6] => https://www.dexknows.com/business_profiles/tran_nursery-b1407607
[13] => https://www.northwestnurseryoutlet.com/
Here is another example:
Search phrase: boat windows
10 results per page
[1] => https://www.freemanmarine.com/ProductsWindows.htm
[2] => https://www.motionwindows.com/about.php
[3] => https://www.usamarinewindows.com/
[4] => https://www.boatwindows.com/
[5] => https://www.boatwindows.biz/
[6] => https://www.rainierwindows.com/fabricators.html
100 results per page
[1] => https://www.freemanmarine.com/ProductsWindows.htm
[2] => https://www.freemanmarine.com/Windows_Standard_Duty.htm
[3] => https://www.freemanmarine.com/
[4] => https://www.motionwindows.com/about.php
[5] => https://www.motionwindows.com/marine-windows.php
[6] => https://www.motionwindows.com/
The vast majority of people search with their search results page set to 10 results per page. So to accurately check your website rankings on Google, you need to keep your search settings set to 10 and manually page through the results.
Many automated checkers work with the page set to 100 results. This new change in how Google delivers search results will cause false low rankings. I wonder if this is why Google made this change?