Rank movement

Upwork says its search uses "platform-generated data" such as completed projects and client feedback, and freelancer-written information such as descriptions of the services offered. It does not say how much each counts, and it shows a profile owner no position history. Movement has to be measured from outside.

The measurement has a trap. A rank row exists only when a profile was found, so comparing the latest rank with the previous rank row compares against whatever older scan happened to find the profile. Upsight compares the last two completed scans of the keyword from its scan log instead, so every scan counts, including those that found nobody. The result is one of five states: up, down, same, new on the board, or lost from it. The depth of each scan is kept too, because absent from the top 250 and absent from the top 500 are different facts.

Daily noise grows with depth. Near the top a move of a few places means something; far down the list the same profile can move dozens of places between days with nothing changed on the profile. A move should be read against its depth and over more than one day.

Coarser charts follow the same caution. A week is not the last scan of the week, which would let one day the profile was not found erase six days it was; it is the average of the days that placed.

How Upsight uses it. The rank tracker shows each keyword's best position from the roster, its movement since the scan before and a thirty-day history, and every roster member on the same search with their own move; see keyword rank, page one and keyword difficulty.