SERPS Tracking - Any recomendations?

[Mexicana]

Here's the problem, I guess that many others suffer from, you have results for lots of search phrases in the natural listings, how can you keep track of where you rank for them all with out typing in each one in to each search engine and trawling through the results until you find your site?

Can anyone recommend any software or web service that can accurately track search engine results for a range of search phrases on a periodical basis?

[dougs]

web position gold

advance web ranking

Doug

[philhancox]

I think Google webmaster tools gives you the position of your site for keywords that were actually used to find the site.

[adrian]

Originally Posted by dougs web position gold advance web ranking Doug

Hi Doug,

Have you used any of these. Can you recommend any?

Cheers

Adrian

[cyates]

Im actually in the middle of creating my own software.

it will check google , msn , yahoo

both .coms and teh .co.uk engines

keep an eye on www.campaigntracking.co.uk

it will let you save keywords in bulk so you can mass check results and view in easy to view table

stay tuned guys

[dougs]

used them both, both are good and give you more features than you can think of....plus they let you trial fro free I believe

Doug

[Mexicana]

Originally Posted by dougs web position gold advance web ranking Doug

Thanks Doug, FYI,
- Advance Web Ranking are offering a 30 day trial on their download resource (which seems to me to have slightly higher than average minimum system requirements, in case any one is interested)
- WebPosition Pro also offer a 30 day trial on their download resource (only seems to run on windows but that is the only requirement)

[Mexicana]

Originally Posted by philhancox I think Google webmaster tools gives you the position of your site for keywords that were actually used to find the site.

Thanks for that Phil,

Some useful and interesting stuff there.

It gives the 20 "Top search queries" and where the site ranks for them. It is some what unclear with regards to what, exactly, it means by "Top search queries" but I guess that it means the highest volume search phrases that got any clicks or it could just be highest volume search phrases that feature the site in the results.

It also gives "Top clicked queries" and where the site ranks for them.

[Mexicana]

Originally Posted by cyates Im actually in the middle of creating my own software. it will check google , msn , yahoo both .coms and teh .co.uk engines keep an eye on Untitled Document it will let you save keywords in bulk so you can mass check results and view in easy to view table stay tuned guys

Good luck with that, any idea when it will be ready? If it's soonish and I haven't committed to another I might be interested in testing it for you, if you like. (i.e. can I use it for free )

[Mexicana]

I'm not altogether clear on this, perhaps someone can shed some light, but as I understand it, Google has various 'hubs' (I don't know if they have a more exact name) that serve results for various geographic regions and those results are tailored, to an extent, to provide more geographically relevant results. That is to say, if you are in London and you search for "Chinese restaurant" you will get different results from someone in New York.

It seems that even results for the same search phrase on google.com and google.co.uk (world wide results) are quite different. For example, I rank at 36 on google.com but when I search on google.co.uk I rank at number 11 for the same phrase (and 12 on UK only results, which is odd because I only actively target the UK ).

And this is relevant here because...?

Ah ha! I have recently been trying a free web based service by Sitening who offer a SERP Tracker service but I notice that the positions they are reporting were different from what I expected, not huge differences, say between 5 and 20 places out and generally down , but then I noticed that they are based in Nashville, TN and I assume that their server is not far away so the results that they report are likely to be US or even Tennessee biased which, in its self is quite interesting, but not really that useful to me.

I would guess that a download software program like those that Doug recommended above and another that I have already downloaded but haven't used yet, by WebCEO, are likely to produce results that reflect more accurately the results I would consider to be 'accurate'. That is to say, the results that I get as an average punter, in the UK, doing a regular search. On the other hand, I think I read somewhere, I think that it was in one of the sales pitches for one of these, that unless the download programs are carefully manipulated to simulate human search activity the search engines, that you are submitting hundreds of searches to in a very short space of time, may block your IP for a while for SPAM or unfair use or whatever. I think it was in minutes or hours but still a pain in the...

Does any one know the % of UK located google searches that are done on the .com compared to the .co.uk? Is there a list of these 'hubs' and is it possible to see what results the different give?

Also, am I obsessed with google?

[drivetowin]

Google does have a number of datacenters around the world - do a hunt on Google for Google Datacenters and you should find a list of them fairly easily - and yes results can and do vary from datacenter to datacenter - and Google decides which datacenter to serve results from pretty dynamically, so you could be sitting right next to someone else in your office and actually see different results in Google as one of you could be getting results form datacenter 'A' and the other one from datacenter 'B' (you can get the same effect sometimes by refreshing your browser too).

I wouldn't get too hung up on Google position, a) because it is visitors that are really important, you can be no1 for 100 different keywords/keyword phrases but if no one searches for them except you, your dog and your neighbour's dog then it's pretty irrelevant and b) if you are not on the first two pages of Google results for your keyphrase you may as well not be there, traffic drops off rapidly between the top and bottom of page one, drops off even further on page two (though there is some evidence to suggest that position 1 at the top of page two gets more traffic than the position at the bottom of page one) and by page three traffic is down to a trickle.

You do need to be careful with these automated keyword tools, a) because it may get your IP banned and b) because there is anecdotal evidence that too many automated queries can lead to your domain being penalised by Google.