Miamacs - 12:58 pm on Aug 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

Ranking reports for one site are one thing

Yeah but that's exactly what is 'asked for' and which they don't have. They could have a ranking report tool on WMT or Analytics or even AdWords listing the keywords of the webmasters' choice, ( at least 50, ckecking the top 100 ). Isn't this a completely valid request...? I'd call it even absurd that Google has a phobia of ranking checks. Querying their website is a ranking check. It's just bothersome and inelegant.

help reverse engineer the algorithm

sure, but reverse engineer with what, rankings? If they'd be afraid of this then they could as well shut down web search for I can get those numbers just by querying their site.

besides, they should know that ranking reports aren't even meant for SEOs but executives.

SEOs already know, that exaclty because of everflux, regionalized, timeofday, dayofweek, random, buggy results... it's a noisy indicator of trends and that's that. ( heck, one site I track ranked for its key target anywhere from #1 to #4 the past week within the same 10 minutes! I'm gonna 'report back' one of these numbers to execs, we'll see the overall trend and no one will - be able to - reverse engineer anything. It wasn't in the top 100 two months ago, now it's top 4, all we did was pure white hat Google itself promotes as necessary. Do I really have to use pen and paper to track these changes ? Why ? )

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As an SEO I query Google by hand, sometimes fast enough to get filtered out for being a bot. Rank checkers are not flexible enough to get to the bottom of the why's and how's, can't analyze things / spot patterns the way I do. That's not what they're for.

My API key will give back 100 results per day before it fails.

uh... if you're talking about SOAP having a daily limit of 100 queries, don't worry.
It always had?

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