Variation Position Variance

Variation Position Variance reports how spread out your keyword variations are within a page’s body — it returns the average distance of each variation’s position from their collective center, so a low number means the variations cluster together and a high number means they are scattered across the content. Despite the name, it is a mean absolute deviation, not statistical variance, and neither a low nor a high value is universally better.

What it measures

This factor reports the spread of all keyword-variation positions around their average. Rather than counting how often the variations appear, it describes how evenly those appearances are distributed through the body: when the distinct generated variations surface in a few tight clusters the spread is small, and when they are peppered across widely separated passages the spread is large.

How RankGear measures it

RankGear combines the UTF-16 offsets for every distinct generated variation in the cleaned, lowercased, trimmed body, computes the mean of those offsets, then averages the absolute distance of each offset from that mean. Despite “Variance” in the name, this is mean absolute deviation, not statistical variance. With no positions, it returns 0.

positions = [ offset of each distinct variation ]
mean      = average(positions)
variance  = average( abs(offset - mean) for offset in positions )
// returns 0 when positions is empty

How to optimize it

Treat this as an observation about how your variations are distributed rather than a target to chase. Use relevant variations across the content only where their meanings genuinely fit — and avoid engineering the number by imposing artificial uniform spacing, repeating variations, or adding unrelated variants simply to alter the spread. Because lower and higher are not universally better, there is no ideal value to build toward; let the spread follow from writing variations where they belong.

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 the offsets are measured against the stripped text, not what you see in the editor.
• The generated variation set affects this and every other variation-based factor, so a change to which variations are generated can shift the spread reported here.
• These are descriptive distribution statistics; lower or higher is not universally better. The value relates to how a page sits within a measured result set — it is a prioritization signal, not a cause of ranking, and it guarantees nothing.

Related factors

• Variation Clustering Score
• Variations in Search Result Display URL

Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.