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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: July 28, 2007 - 6:08 pm
Posted By: Sebastian 347 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://sebastianx.blogspot.com)
Category: Google SEO
Actually, it was launched in the last century, but it's well worth a rediscovery ;)
14 Comments
Comments
Yes...BUT...say you have oh, I don't know...40 sites. Let's say that each site has 10 fairly important keyword phrases that you'd like to know the rankings for. That's 400 manual searches. Seems a bit time-consuming to me.
Well, I've way more than 40 sites, plus the client's sites. I closely watch traffic, conversions, referrers and such stuff, even crawling. I've developed tools to automate these tasks as much as possible. Sole rankings are somewhat useless information, I need to know which SERP spots bring in money to maintain those. To discover rankings w/o traffic I analyze SERP referrers and -periodically- Google's query stats. So no, I don't need a ranking report of 10 fairly important keywords per site.
So, if you don't need to know for 10, then why would you need to know for 1? In other words, either you check the rankings or you don't. If not, then Google's "tool" isn't needed either, right? I guess my point isn't whether or not rankings are useless or not. If it's useful, then the manual method will lose its luster quickly. If it's not useful, then one doesn't need a manual method either.
Well, I wouldn't state it that absolutely. I don't need scheduled ranking reports, but I do need to check a ranking every now and then. Say my SERP referrer analysis gives me a list of search terms a site of mine ranks for, but the keywords in question don't generate a reasonable amount of traffic. (It happens that searchers click on a result which looks totally crappy on the SERP because it's not optimized for the query and its context. If that happens on the first few SERPs, I capture it.) If the search term looks somewhat promising, I click on the linked /ie SERP which tells me whether this ranking is persistent or for example just the result of a ping from a new page scheduled to disappear from the top10 in no time. If I rank by accident for a neat keyword phrase I try to optimize the snippet to improve the CTR. And there are other situations where I want to see where my stuff ranks. But that's always in a situation where I'm interested in a particular ranking, usually alerted by a report based on traffic figures or so. I do ad hoc ranking checks, but I don't need to monitor rankings as ego food, because that's distracting and leads to laziness. For ad hoc queries Google's "manual method" is suitable.
Actually, Sebastian, I hate to break it to you, but more often than not the /ie? results are not the same that people see when they get the /search? results. That is why I specifically wrote my latest tool to check by the /search? method.
It's fine if you want to use it as a snippet-free searching method for personal use, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to check rankings that are different than what actual searchers see.
Try adding &hl=en &safe=off and stuff like that. /ie? is not that different from /search? but it doesn't factor in personalized search, and perhaps it pulls results from a different data center, what can happen with /search? too.
At the time of posting the /ie? and /search? results for my sample were identical, and still are today BTW, but the rankings from your tool differ 3 positions from manual searches I submitted while your tool was running. There's nothing wrong with that, from another place I would probably have seen your rankings.
However, IMO /ie? is accurate enough for ad hoc lookups. When I deal with search terms in flux I spot the deviations anyway and can drill down with nifty tools like http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/google-multidc-rank-check.htm
Also, I'm more interested in comparing a ranking to click throughs than to "other" rankings. With Google's index becoming more and more dynamic I've to live with ups and downs of a few positions. The truth is in my traffic stats, with capture the SERP# as well as the SE domain etcetera.
Classic, Sebastian...thanks for this! :)
Thanks Jill :)
Maybe you like this (related) pamphlet too:
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/2007/07/analyzing-search-engine-rankings-by.html
Heh. Some "creative" voting here :(
Sebastian, thanks for sharing! Great stuff.
I prefer http://www.prsearch.biz/rankmass.php
while this is a neat way to search, it is unreliable for rank checking. if you side by side it like i just did you'll notice that it's not always accurate. i'm #4 on regular search and #7 with this way.
If I am gonna look at Google Serps, I need to look at all the information generally given (Description,URL). For some reason looking at a list of Title tags just urks me :)
With seasonal sites regular and automated ranking checks make sense:
http://www.seo-scoop.com/2007/08/07/why-i-check-rankings