Webposition ranking report not accurate?

[Eljaybe]

Hi, I downloaded the trial version of Webposition 4.0 and ran the reporter for my client's website and their competitors. I wanted to determine their current rankings in the search engines (those that are available in the trial version). I have used this program before, but this time I noticed that the ranking reports were not matching up with the search results I found by hand. For instance, I would see a competitor's site listed in the top 5 for a certain keyword phrase, but when Webposition ran the report it came back with "not in top 30" results? Anyone else ever encounter this problem? Is there a better program out there that saves time (and headache)?

[cgrantski]

You can get WP to keep a snapshot of the whole results page(s) that it found. You might want to look at that to see if WP is misinterpreting what was fed to it by the search engines at that moment. It's under "Detail Report."

I once was sure WP was messing up, but I discovered through the above exercise that it was faithfully reflecting what it was seeing according to the rules it plays by. There are, however, a couple of settings that cause problems. If you have "report only the top ranked page" turned ON, try turning it off and running it again. That was my problem - if the top ranked page was a paid rank then the "unpaid" rank would be overlooked. Turning off "report only top ranked page" fixed it.

[Eljaybe]

Thanks for the tip. I will check that. I don't believe I had that feature turned on, I think I just had asked it to check any pages on my site that are indexed. I copied and pasted competitor URLs exactly into the report so there should be no error there.

[topsites]

I only say this because I have been down this road and I speak from personal experience, meaning I used wpg long enough to learn and understand it does more harm than good.

Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:

* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google's Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

That's straight from the horse's mouth... See:
[google.com...]

What you do is your own business, I can not tell you what to do but I do not regard this program very highly myself... Nevermind Google's position for if google did not exist, it still doesn't change a thing - Do yourself a favor and start thinking along the lines of doing things differently...
You may not see the changes right away but me thinks in the long run you will benefit.

[dickbaker]

topsites, is there a rank checking program that Google approves of?

[cgrantski]

Has anybody been banned or penalized by Google for using this product? Google blocked my IP from doing searches early on, before the Gold edition, but I have had no problems at all since then and we use WPG often. We don't even use the API (yet) but we do use the "engine friendly" mode of WPG, which is basically a way to space out the queries.

SearchEngineNews (Planet Ocean Communications) wrote an article about the whole controversy in October 2005. Here are some quotes.

"WebPosition has incorporated a number of features into their software to avoid irritating Google. Reports can be run using Google's API, which is Google's preferred method of submitting automated queries to them. There's also the option of running the software in "search engine friendly" mode, which means WebPosition pauses a set period of time between queries to avoid overtaxing Google's servers. And when you do run your ranking report, do it at night or in other off-peak times."

"Google supplies the search results to AOL, so AOL and Google will display nearly identical search results in most cases. This means that, if you're especially concerned about being penalized by Google. you can run your queries on AOL instead, and get the same information."

"Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Director of Web Marketing Today stated, '...in order to ease the drudgery of search engine optimization, all search engine optimization professionals use software tools to provide ranking reports. WebPosition users are not penalized for running ranking reports. Google only mentions WebPosition because it is the leading search engine optimization software. It is incumbent upon all of us to use Google's resources respectfully and frugally and not abuse them. But it seems altogether un reasonable to forego the use of third-party software tools altogether.'"

And in the same article, a quote from WebPosition ...

"If you hear of a Web site being banned by Google, it normally takes some form of spamming on the person's Web site for that to happen, not simply running WebPosition's Reporter. That's because WebPosition Gold 1.60 as well as WebPosition Gold 2 do NOT pass the user's URL to Google when running keyword reports or verifying URLs. In the case of URL verification, it does a query on a keyword phrase and then scans the results for the user's domain name off-line."

"Therefore, Google's server cannot look at rank checking queries from your IP address and say they belong to a particular Web site, which is on another IP, and ban it. Although they can certainly launch scare tactics to make you believe that if you check your rankings your Web site will be banned, that has not been the case as we've observed it. If it were, we'd be hearing a flood of complaints from our customers about being banned and that is just not happening."

[topsites]

It isn't the influenced ranking on the engine that bothers me per se. It is that I don't believe a visitor's first click on our trick link makes a positive lasting impression, thou the last impression it likely is, for that visitor.
If I do a search for something and a site comes up that appears to be relevant and I click it, then it turns out it is not only not what I wanted but worse yet, it is there because someone tricked the engine, I can assure you I will remember that domain for some time so that I can make sure I do not click their link again.

My memory serves me well. I know there are times some domain shows up in EVERY single search conducted or the entire first page of results ALL lead to the same bs (or both), I am certain if you haven't run into this, sooner or later, you will. Experience this once or twice, and you will see what I mean. It isn't that extra hits are not gained (they ARE), it is the mindset of the person that has just been fooled is what bothers me.

After all, someone willing to trick the engines surely isn't far behind from attempting to trick me (like out of my hard-earned money, or in other ways). And this does not build trust, thou it does destroy it, and fast.

[Eljaybe]

I think there are perfectly legit ways to use a program like Webposition. If you only use it to check your positions occasionally, then there shouldn't be a problem. You can use the tool without abusing it. For instance, I would not use the tool for page submissions, I would do that by hand. But, the tool does analyze your pages, give tips and the latest SE news and print out some pretty nice reports.
It frees up a lot of time. Trying to do a search on every search engine keyword after keyword could take days! I am just concerned about the accuracy of the Reporter reports, that's all.