Positioning software, does it work?

[kevinj]

I've just downloaded the WebPosition Gold free trial and am considering purchasing the full product. Has anyone used this system and had good results? Any pitfalls?

[miles]

Yup I have used it for the past 2 years and it has a good many pit falls. The old version WPG1 doesnt run all the search engines that I select and when it does it returns errors of all sizes and shapes. WPG2 will not run on a scheduler and when it does it stops after 2 short reports. I sent an email out to customer support and that was 3 weeks ago with no responce. Many of the guys I know are having the same problems. Look around a little while longer or maybe one of the other webmasters here can suggest a solution.

[fathom]

Any pitfalls?

What? Other than getting banned from Google and Yahoo.

[miles]

If you use it too much your ip will get pegged and then you will get your site banned. So if you do get it use it sparingly and if you can from a different ip, some SEOs have rotating ips.

[fathom]

So if you do get it use it sparingly and if you can from a different ip, some SEOs have rotating ips.

Although a fair tip... the point of searching ranked position is "to see where you stand".

One look at your log files will tell you this.

It is however, risk management and good tip or not, if search engine traffic is important to you, IMHO the risk is far too great.

Google is on recorded as saying you will be banned (rank checking one word at a time... probably not), and some members here can't search in Yahoo at all (ranking checking nor manual search).

Some SEO's also use hidden links, keyword stuffing, etc. and do quite well, at least for a time.

In my experience, if you start with smoking a cigarette a day, the habit soon grows until you depend on it, and then BAM! Lung cancer.

Best to avoid the habit.

[Beachboy]

From an optimization perspective, in my experience, I find it to be very inadequate. This is because it does not take into account the powerful effects of link popularity, PageRank, themes and inbound link anchor text on positioning. Therefore, the results of its "sampling" of top-ranked sites (from which it attempts to reverse engineer the algo) are usually erroneous and could be disastrous to users. I assume WPG2 behaves the same way in this regard that WPG1 did, and I quit using it ages ago.

[jimbeetle]

Hi kevinj,

I stopped using WPG a couple of years ago because I didn't find it too useful for very competitive keywords. As Beachboy says, it doesn't take into account pagerank and other off-page criteria.

When I used WPG to compare a page against the top three for certain keywords I was always able to tweak it, quite easily, to where it should have been well optimized. But when you're comparing against sites that might have hundreds, if not thousands, of links back to them, well, their pages really don't have to be the optimal examples of the alogorithm to get top placement.

What I do now is look for the first small player amongst all of the big ones. If that got into the top five with only 40 links or so as opposed to 400 then that's the page I consider well-optimized for on-page criteria. Once you've got that and some quality incoming links things should work.

I also bought into WPG because the basic stuff -- keywords in the title, head, lead the paragraph with them, put a couple in the middle of the paragraph, blah, blah -- sounded too simple. There had to be magic. Uh uh. There ain't no magic and the basics do work.

Ooops, almost forgot. If available, always check the SEs cached version of the page against the one that's actually served.

Jim

[miles]

kevinj WPG 1 or 2 is basically for just finding your position or for people who fill listings on pages to close contracts. Now if you want to know where to invest your time and money into, I would spend time optimizing the current site for the big 3; google, yahoo, and msn. I have found you can get the best results using the basics and going for google. I dont like the idea of having all your eggs in one basket, but sometimes you have to play your best hand. If you are just looking to find out where you are listing so be it you can get WPG 1 or 2.

[kevinj]

Thanks everyone for the great advice. I was leary about purchasing the full product. I'm currently trying to market my e-commerce site via search engine placement the free way first. Later I'll move into pay per click advertising. Any other thoughts on optimization and improving placement would be greatly appreciated.

Kevin