rank them software - is this a violation?

I found an interesting little freeware app at http://www.nonags.com/nonags/index.html called Rank Them. The description is ... Rank Them is a FREE software designed for Search Engine Specialists, Webmasters and everyone who wants to have a lot of traffic on their own web sites. It allows you to monitor web site's rank on all popular search engines. And because the program can search through all 3 Google search engines (www, www2, www3) you can also use it specifically to monitor 'Google dance' You can specify unlimited number of keywords and how deep you want to search. At the end of search you'll get a rank and page number where your Web site is located. After that you can save a report to HTML file. ... Would this violate any of the search engine's policies in any way? If not, this could be very handy!

Hi dazzlindonna,

In response to our query, wireless cove has published an article part of which i have submitting it over here

Myth: Using software to check your search engine positions will get your site penalized.

Fact: This belief is still widespread today, even among many respected industry professionals. Since Google states in their terms of service that ranking software should not be used to check rankings, many people interpret this to mean that Google will penalize the sites that are being checked. However, for largely the same reasons described in the previous myth, this just wouldn't make sense. The ability to get your competitors penalized by repeatedly running software to check their search engine positions would be a very powerful (and unfair) weapon, and Google realizes this. What they will do, however, is penalize the IP address of the machine that is running the software. This can make for uncomfortable moments when you have to explain why everybody sharing your office T1 line is denied access to Google, but won't get your site penalized.

With the consent of wireless cove i have included this and other useful points in a document called chenjacob document. To read more about this document click here

http://www.seochat.com/viewtopic.php?t=1475