How To Do Legitimate Rank Checking

[danwhitehouse]

Hi all,
As an SEO, there's still tremendous value in knowing what the rankings are for keywords within search engines. There's plenty of tools out there that 'do the job' but nothing robust enough to tick the following two boxes:

- Ease of use
- Comply with Google's ToS (no scraping allowed)

I suppose my question is (ignoring <snip>) how can we measure bulk ranks quickly and easily endearing to Google's ToS? I'm actually looking for a legitimate solution rather than going down the proxy root.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

[edited by: goodroi at 1:02 pm (utc) on Jul 5, 2013]
[edit reason] Please no specific tools/services [/edit]

[goodroi]

Please remember that we don't allow specific tools or services to be mentioned in order to protect WebmasterWorld from being flooded with spam & promotional posts. We have made an exception with the Favorite SEO Tool thread [webmasterworld.com...] so if you want to post a specific tool or service head over to that thread. Thank You!

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[goodroi]

You want to consider looking at the adwords preview tool. Also Google licenses their search results to outside websites. You may consider crawling those websites for rankings but you may find the rankings are not exactly the same as Google's serps.

[Planet13]

Well, the easiest way I know of is to look in google webmaster tools since it does show average rank position in there.

Otherwise it is third-party tools (listed in the Favorite SEO Tool thread) or proxies.

I am sorry if this is not much help. Would love to know if there is another way, too.