Track your Google results

[toolkit]

Check out this new tool for tracking your site's placement in Google - http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

Simple but beautiful, and free

[digitalpoint]

Just a FYI... it's been updated...

- You can apply country and/or language restrictions to your account
- Also tracks back links historically
- Historical back link and keyword placement data can be displayed as a chart
- You can export your reports to CSV
- You can email your reports
- Ability to create/save custom charts
- Can track multiple placements in a single page of results

And of course, it's still free.

- Shawn

[NaturalInstinct]

Thanks Shawn, i've been using this for a week now and it's vertainly very useful. Easier than typing a search into google, looking for your result and plotting it in excel, which is what i was doing.

[renegade]

Looks brill but asks for google API key and the terms of use for the API forbid use to track keywords for commercial use so isn't it out-of-bounds for affiliate marketing use or am I missing something?

[digitalpoint]

There is nothing in the API terms about tracking keywords.

In fact the terms page:

http://www.google.com/apis/api_terms.html

Doesn't even have the string "keyword" *in* it.

As far as commercial use, I think it more has to do with the developers who use the API... Basically I couldn't sell the service (although I could be wrong).

- Shawn

[NaturalInstinct]

just one thing.

the new graphs are a great addition but would it be possible to put the key underneath the graph instead of on top of it ?

[digitalpoint]

There are some problems with doing it that way unfortunately... the image size needs to be defined before you plot the lines (so at that point you don't know how many lines you are going to have). So if you had only a few, you would end up with a bunch of blank space on the bottom of the image which is ugly. If you had a ton, the key wouldn't be complete...

- Shawn

[NaturalInstinct]

how about doing a nice graph as an image and just putting the key in html below the image ?

[digitalpoint]

It's another thought I had already... problem with that is the HTML portion of the page is drawn/rendered before the image (the HTML is what *calls* the image within the IGM tag).

It would be possible by doing double the work I suppose on the backend (reading all values twice and parsing through them twice (once for the chart, once for the legend)... but already something I thought of and tossed around in my mind.

At this point it's not going to happen that way... the server is already under quite a large load as it is (it's averaging about 250,000 queries to Google per day and there are multiple people using it at any given time), and it's only expected to grow as more people find out about it... So I'm trying to build it from the beginning to scale well.

I would like to do something about it at some point, because I agree it's a little ugly... but as of right now I'm only going to do it if I can figure out a way without doubling the resources needed to generate the chart...

- Shawn

[renegade]

Originally posted by digitalpoint There is nothing in the API terms about tracking keywords. In fact the terms page: http://www.google.com/apis/api_terms.html Doesn't even have the string "keyword" *in* it. As far as commercial use, I think it more has to do with the developers who use the API... Basically I couldn't sell the service (although I could be wrong). - Shawn

Shawn, I was looking here, when I went to create the google account:
https://www.google.com/accounts/TermsOfService
Google makes it pretty clear they don't want me to use it to track ads.

[digitalpoint]

You are looking at the wrong terms and services...

API terms and services are here:
http://www.google.com/apis/api_terms.html

Of course, you are bound by Google's "normal" terms of service as well, but if there are any conflicts, the API terms of service wins:

From API terms:
-----
In the event of a conflict between these Terms and Conditions and Google's Terms of Service, these Terms and Conditions shall prevail.
-----

Also, you may want to read the API FAQ as well:

http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html

The whole purpose of the API is to make queries to Google since their normal terms of service do not allow automated querying.

- Shawn

[renegade]