What The, or, Google Bug Screws Rank Checker Rankings Today

On waking up today, as a good SEO boy, I ran some rankings. I use the SEObook Rank Checker. I nearly had a heart attack for 10 mins. A lot of my rankings were gone! Not in the top 200. Wiped out. On all my sites.

Any of you having a similar 10-minute hear attack? Don't worry, I've figured it out and I bring you relief. Your rankings are there.

The reason I was able to figure it out is that I noticed to things simultaneously.

(1) Rank Checker shows the rankings 1-10 and 101-100 as unchanged. It is all the other ones that are gone. (Would have been perfect for April 1, but it's real.)

(2) My Google search settings are always set to show 100 results per page. I noticed today that Google was showing 10 results/page. I went to change the setting, but it won't change. Google lets you select 100 results/page, but it won't do anything.

Can't be a coincidence, I'm betting Rank Checker depends on the 100 results per page thing. So within each 100 it sees only the results that are in the top 10 of that 100.

I went and checked manually. Your results are there!

P.S. Google switched to streaming results today (Google Instant). Can't be a coincidence. Google doesn't seem want to stream 100 results at a time.

P.P.S. Turning off Google Instant fixes the Rank Checker problem. The on/off toggle is next to the search button.

Ive had this problem too, expect heart attack I almost went number 2in my pants. Something is off with a LOT of the ranking checkers. My theory? Perhaps that new live search thing Googles been messing with might throw something off? Who knows, but yeah, all my rankings were a little off until I checked them manually.

What software(s) do you use and how off are the results?

I use two websites:

SEOmoz tracker
DigitalPoints Keyword Tracker tool

Also, my WebCEO software is ALWAYS out of whack.

See the PS I added in the first post. Little doubt that this has to do with Google Instant, I guess the tools would need to be adjusted.

Anyone using IBP? What's up there?

Any rankings tool that is NOT affected?

So, did you remove a search engine now that Yahoo and Bing are the same? Takes a little bit of the fun out if you ask me! On the other hand, it would be nice for those with slow rank checkers but now there is really no excuse to have a slow ranking scan. The new SEOToolSet is supposed to be one of the fastest once it's done.. We will see.

yeah, I took out Yahoo and added Ask to my results reports. Remember Ask? Didn't Ask Jeeves run a super bowl ad one year?

I think the world is ready for yet another hierarchal officious oracle

P.P.S. Turning off Google Instant fixes the Rank Checker problem. The on/off toggle is next to the search button.

I used link assistant rank tracker pretty solid

I don't check ranks - I analyze Analytics... so I'm a N00bie here with this stuff.

I routinely note: "how are sales"... they say "GREAT!" ... I say "rank are too!"

All rank checking software is inherently flakey because it relies on the serach engine results retaining a similar format. The software works by scraping and parsing a results page and when that page layout changes, chances are your rank checking software will bug out.

As the serach engines don't like automated querying, because they have to buy the bandwidth that it consumes, they don't routinely send out a bulletin to the rank checking tool manufacturers to let them know when their search results layout is going to change.

Like fathom says, you don't have to sweat this stuff too much but then some clients do want to track rankings and they may well be paying you on that basis. Generally not the ones making serious money for *themselves* as fathom suggests, and ultimately therefore perhaps not the best clients either.

Everyone wanted, ABSOLUTELY NEEDED a pet rock until they educated themselves that they have hundreds or thousands of them in their backyard for free... all you got to do is pick them up.

My point. Just because everyone wants a ranking report doesn't mean they aren't obsolete.

In a search world where there are 88 billion longtail phrases typed in every month & none are included in your ranking reports but all are included in Analytics (your customers' share) suggests they (your customers) and you are de-evolving.

I said nothing to back the desire for ranking reports, nor am I pandering to it. I accurately said that sometimes clients want them.

Note that my avatar comes from analytics

Hi Rod...

re: "...where there are 88 billion longtail phrases typed in every month..." ?

can you share pls, where you got that stat?

?

Jim

Sorry I missed quoted myself

Google quoted they get 34,000 searches per second back in January.

The previous November they quoted that 20% of all their queries have never been used before or haven't been seen in the past 90 days (e.g. longtail)

Doing the math (20% X 34,000) X 60 (1 min) X 60 (1 hour) X 24 (1 day) X 30 (1 month) = 6800 X 60 X 60 X 24 X 30 = 17,625,600,000 (the 88 billion was all searches)

However with the launch of instant search they updated their daily searches to 20 billion so that now makes it abouts 120,000,000,000 longtail search a month assuming the 20% is still accurate.