Checking Rank

How in the heck do you guy's check your rank in the SE. Is there a quick and simple way of doing this or do you have to go page for page : I am new to this and have to resort to primitive questions like this so please bare with me.

Everyone has their favorite way.

Some folks use tools like WebPosition or Google Monitor.

Others just eyeball the results page by page.

Others tweak the querystring to return more results per page.

Still more others use /ie to determine ranking.

Personally, I wrote a program that clips SERPS and spits out an XML report file so I can make pretty reports for the pointy haired folk.

I am still a little confused but this is a start. Thanks for the info.

If you're still confused, then ask for more help! ;)

To make it really simple, the easiest manual way to check your position is to use http://www.google.com/ie and return 100 results. If you're not in the first 100 your position is really academic (actually, I would argue the first 20 for most searches); nobody is ever going to find you. For example, if I was targeting "widgets":

http://www.google.com/ie?q=widgets&num=100

Search the page for your site and then note your position. Voila.

There are tools like Google Monitor that will do this for you, but they may violate Google's terms of service depending on your definition of "automated".

I downloaded Google Monitor and will try it out now. Thanks

Hey Maximus,

This is not a link forum. I don't know if it's correct to drop actual urls here. Try using 'www.widgets.com' as a metaphor if you need to refer to a URL

I,m new at this. Do my URL's have to be removed?

No, Your URLs don't have to be removed. I have no idea what Marketingology is talking about. I think he might be commenting because you have 2 URLs in your signature, which you can do if you want to. It is up to you.

I was confused about this thread. The title talks about "Rank." I assumed that the author was referring to Page Rank. Page Rank is a number that Google gives to pages to indicate their relative importance. The google tool bar shows a number between 0 and 10 (or nothing). This number is supposed to indicated the importance of a page based on the number and quality of inbound links.

Yet the discussion seems to be about keyword position. Browsing through ie with num=100 is a good way to find se position.

I get confused easily. So it is important for people like me to keep definitions straight. Page Rank is a number given by Google. I understand that your true page rank is a big number. Google displays a number between 0-10.

SE position is where you are in a list.

Having a page rank of 1 is bad. Having position 1 is good.

The final big question is which keywords do you get links from...well, you find those by looking in your logs...If you notice a lot of people coming into your site through the keyword "Hot Babes" then that indicates that you show up high in the rankings for "Hot Babes."

As for using sites for examples...I think "widgets" are so over used. This is the Internet...so we should use "Hot Babes" as the example when we want to discuss good positioning techniques, and "coupons, coupons, coupons" as the bad example.

Back to the subject...what is the best way of finding the page rank number. You see it with the google bar...and can see it in the google directory. Is there any other way to find Page Rank?

Also, Darrin pointed all the links at an internal redirect page, so I'm sure it's ok to post link when they are relevant.

Thank's for all the advice so far. My main question was how do I easily find where my web sites are positioned in the SE's? I got my answer and I also learned how page ranking works. You guy's really know your stuff. Thank again to everyone's advice. I know I will be here alot more in the near future.

I am VERY hesitant to use this program, has anyone else been using this for a while?

The problem is I have over 400 domains and if I do a check for each domains for at least 20 keywords then I am sure that I will get spotted by google....

Anyone else is my position that has been using this program?

My bad. I assumed they meant position because they said "SE rank" and not "Google rank", and I went with that to avoid confusion. Naturally this had the opposite effect. heh. Sorry everyone!

Since we are on the subject of Page Rank...what ways are there to check page rank? Is the google bar the only way? How long after the dance does the Google Bar start showing the new page rank? Is there a way to show the page rank on other servers. Is there a way I could see my page rank on www-sj?

You can add an entry to your hosts file for toolbarqueries.google.com, and assuming your system looks there first when resolving hostnames it will use whatever you want to determine pagerank. For example, to use www-sj, add this:



If you are using NT/2000, your hosts file can be found at \winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

The PageRank displayed in your browser will now be the PageRank according to www-sj. Don't forget to comment the line out when you want to return to normal.

According to posts on WW, PageRank on www-sj is out of date, so don't get too upset or excited over what you may discover.