...may be going the way of the Dodo.

 @Jill Hi, checking rankings is useful if you want to make sure you best performing keywords are in the first page of results and not several  pages down ;-)

No, actually checking rankings aren't good for that since what any 2 or more people see as the rankings will be different at any given time, and any given place.

You are partially right. Let's dive a little bit deeper on this topic.

Rankings can vary based on several different factors:

1. Physical location/geotargeting
2. Browser language configuration
3. Number of results selection (i.e: 10, 20, 100, etc.)
4. Datacenters
5. Type of search query
6. Ranking algorithms tests (when search engines experiment with new algos)
7. Search engine country domain (i.e: .uk, .au, etc.)
8. Etc.

First of all, some queries never change no matter what. One example of this is navigational/brand searches. They [always] return the URL of the site. Do a search for "sphinn", "sphinn.com" or http://sphinn.com and you will get the same results. Brand searches are very important in many markets. For example, the search for "viagra" always returns "viagra.com" as the first result.

You can add the localization parameters to your Google searches to test many different locations and confirm this: “&gl=US”, “&gr=US-CA”, “&gcs=San%20Francisco”

In my experience most rankings fluctuate based on the physical location of the searcher and it is very easy for a passive rank checking tool (that does traffic analysis instead of pooling search engines) to use the IP of the requestor to identify his or her location and group the rankings based on that information. At the end of the day, the most profitable traffic (traffic that converts) comes from a specific set of regions, so it is wise to make sure we are listed prominently when people search for us from those regions.

For example, let say that people looking for “running shoes” from “San Francisco, CA”. They see our site on page 4, but people from “Ontario, CA” see the site on page one; but our PPC data and analytics show that we don’t make any sales from “SF, CA” but we do make good sales from Canada, we want to make anything possible to improve our listings for Canada users. Maybe even use Google webmaster tools to set that country as our preferred location.

BTW, I completely agree that rankings are not the best measure of success of an SEO campaign, IMO traffic and conversions are the best metric. But is hard to think that getting listed on page one for your most profitable keywords (in your most profitable regions) is not a useful goal.

Cheers

And Hamlet, you forgot about personalized search as well. You can't get the general public to turn that off, so you have no idea what they're actually seeing in the SERPs.

For some queries, everyone who issues the query is looking for the same thing. For other queries, different people want very different results even though they express their need in the same way

MattC/All,

I believe there is a solution here. 

Google says in TOS (and I'm paraphrasing or course), to use their interface provided (aka, manually perform searches via google homepage).  Now IPs are being blocked for specifically running automated rank checking software. This makes no sense to me. 

I don't want to set my preferences to 50 or 100 results and manually check rank for 50 key phrases, it is grossly inefficient and backwards, but, in essence, that is what Google wants.  If Google's position is that it uses up too many resources OR perhaps that it doesn't allow Google to serve up our ads  to an actual user (aka support revenue stream; ) or some other monetary consideration, then simply charge for the access.  I would pay Google for rank checking "access" or high resource units or whatever you want to call it.  Even better yet, how about Google sells their own rank monitoring service?

I'm not here to unduly tax Google resources, but it is important to me to have as much information and monitoring in place and there is significant marketing value to rank monitoring.  And significant value to efficiency.

So instead of IP blocking because of volume or identification of components of WPG or WEBCEO etc., creating ill-will among those that see value in monitoring information, just give us an option to pay for advanced volume "access" either directly via Google or work out a surcharge with WPG, webceo, etc.

Why?  Because rank monitoring is important.  It establishes or verifies a cause/effect relationship in marketing, is clearly something that can be influenced, and often a change in rank of a few positions can reap great rewards making improved ranking a most worthy SEO goal.

I'm also curious to those who say checking your rank is of no value, can you tell me that you never Google a key phrase to see where you are in the results?  Never?  Well if you do, even now and then, guess what, you're rank checking and wasting time by doing it manually.