Keyword Rank Checking

Google’s Matt Cutts delivers some excellent advice about keyword focus, expanding on what you’ve got, and having a more positive SEO approach in this clip. However, he does completely gloss over (read: avoid) the question the user is actually asking, which is – how can I check keyword rankings more efficiently? It seems to me the user is asking for a shortcut. Asking Matt to give him permission to find a better, less time consuming way to monitor his progress. Denied!

Well, user, there are many ways to check your Google rankings other than scrolling through the results manually. Do a search for “rank checkers” or “rank checking” and see what’s available. They run from free to pricey, from software to online tools. Just know that they’re all officially disapproved of by Google and every other search engine.

Google has openly and at length frowned upon the use of any automated queries being run on the Google database. Their campaign has worked quite effectively, as there is a belief out there that running automated queries for a website’s keyword rankings will result in the site getting banned – which is absolutely NOT true. Think about that one – how easy would it be to run a handful of search engine ranking reports a few times and get all your competitor’s sites banned? Not happening. But, running repeated automated queries can get the IP of the person running them locked out of Google, and that does happen.

Google is probably seeing a decline in automated queries as rank checkers have become much less helpful now that we’re not all seeing the same search results. User specific results, localized results, and various other Google sorting algorithms can give you and ten other people ten different sets of organic search results for the same query. Constantly checking your keywords seems a lot less useful when you don’t know how far the results you’re seeing (good or bad) are reaching.