While there are lots of sites that claim that they can tell you where your page ranks in Google, most of them provide flawed results or are even violating the Google terms of service. So, is there any way to find out how your pages are ranking in search engines? How do you find out how your pages are doing? Do you use a tool? Please comment with the tools and techniques that you use to track SEO success.
Related Searches google
Explore Web Design / HTML
Must Reads
Most Popular
©2012 About.com. All rights reserved.
A part of The New York Times Company.
I leave my URL blank out of concern for (unlikely) retaliation.
We use an excellent free tool from seocentro.com to check rankings on Google and Bing/Yahoo on a monthly basis for each of our client’s site’s *primary* key phrases.
Three things of note: if the use of seocentro violates Google’s Terms of Service it should not – it simply does a one time search EXACTLY like a manual search would do and within an equivalent time period (we manually log the results between queries) . The second observation, and one that Jen raised, is that, like a manual search, you can sometimes get different results when comparing running the querey twice or checking against manual results. This is, I opine, because both Google and Yahoo/Bing have a myriad of servers and they have mirrors of their respective databases – not all of which are in perfect sync. Finally, we abandoned the use of Web Position Gold because it clearly violates Google’s TOS because of its extensive capabilities. It really can/does bang hard on the servers. We do miss the results WPG gives though.
If I sat among the Google-Gods or the Bing-Meisters I would recommend this as a service in their respective Webmaster tools. We (gods) could control the how and when the survey was executed (during slow periods) and it would likely significantly reduce the use of abusive tools out in the wild. I’d limit th frequency of use (at most weekly) and send out reports just like analytics and PPC results. Just IMHO.
As a tool I use only the developer dashboards, provided by the respective search engines, if we exclude any browser plug-ins like SeoQuake (which is not compatible with my FF beta at the moment, as one would probably expect).
For example, Google does provide some placement and ranking indications on their dashboard. But as I haven’t turned into a hardcore SEO guy so far, I’m probably not realizing the tools I’m missing.
I simply type the websites keyword into (a non logged in) Google and see where we are at. If we do not display on the first page, then something is wrong and the actual position is irrelevant.