TheMadScientist - 9:39 am on May 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

TheMadScientist....so what do you suggest we use to actually get a good sense of where our site ranks if we are not able to emulate what others are seeing? I mean how can we track our rankings across the board (what other searchers are seeing) if we can only seeing ranking from our end and have no clue what they are seeing is the same or not?

Throw out the old school thinking and watch traffic very closely? When you make a change don't go to the results the next day and see if it's there or if your site moves, but give it a week and see what happens with your traffic, maybe?

I actually haven't checked ranking in Google in about 3 months on most of mine... All I've been doing lately is watching traffic, Closely!, but I'm a bit different, so you might want to do something else.

Personally, I think the days of 'instant knowledge' related to change are about gone... IMO moving forward things are going to be more about finding a way to influence and generate traffic than knowing exactly where you rank for a given term. They're moving away from letting us see where we rank for anyone else's searches, and the WMT data is a nice bone to throw, but IMO being able to manage traffic without seeing the SERPs is going to be the key moving forward, because it doesn't matter if you're number 1 in a generic result set when you're between number 5 and 8 in 60% of the personalized sets and your title doesn't attract any attention (AKA Clicks) ... ;)