Average Variation Position reports the mean starting position — as a UTF-16 character offset in the cleaned body — of every occurrence of your distinct keyword variations. It is a descriptive distribution statistic, not a target: a lower or higher average is not universally better.
| Factor ID | RG-SRP-002 |
|---|---|
| Family | Term Position Distribution |
| Measurement | Mean UTF-16 offset |
| Measured zone | Cleaned, lowercased, trimmed body content |
What it measures
This factor reports the average starting position of all occurrences of the distinct generated keyword variations within the cleaned body. In effect, it summarizes where across the page your variation set tends to appear — concentrated near the top, spread through the middle, or weighted toward the end — as a single mean offset.
How RankGear measures it
RankGear lowercases and trims each distinct nonblank variation, finds all of their occurrences in the cleaned, lowercased body, combines the UTF-16 offsets of those occurrences, and returns their mean. When no variation occurs at all, it returns 0.
average = mean( UTF-16 offset of every occurrence of every distinct variation )
= 0 when no occurrences are foundHow to optimize it
Introduce the topic clearly and use semantically appropriate variations throughout the sections where they add precision. Favor natural coverage over fixed placement targets. Treat this number as an observation about how your variations are distributed, not a score to push up or down — there is no placement target to hit.
Important considerations
- Positions are UTF-16 offsets — not words, sentences, pixels, or HTML byte positions.
- Cleaned body content excludes markup and may differ from the raw source, so offsets are measured against the cleaned text rather than what you see in the editor.
- The generated variation set affects this and every other variation-based factor; change the variations and the average shifts with them.
- These are descriptive distribution statistics: lower or higher is not universally better, and the value correlates with position within a measured result set rather than causing any ranking.
Related factors
Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.