Pr0

[Caralis]

Hi all!

I read an article and I was surprised about the possibility of being penalized just for using rank-checking softwares to determine the ranking at Google.

Your opinion?

[edited by: Caralis at 1:15 pm (utc) on Mar. 20, 2003]

[edited by: Marcia at 6:30 pm (utc) on Mar. 24, 2003]

[creative craig]

It is in the Google TOS and I expect if they can relate your searchs to a particular web site then they might take action against it.

Craig

[cwebb]

Yeah, but that would be hard as I could easily run such software and "analyze" competitor's sites and get them penalized, not me!

[ciml]

Hello Caralis. If you send automated queries to Google then there's a strong chance that your Internet connection will be blocked, but not your Web site.

Assuming that your competitors don't run rank checkers from your Web server, your site shouldn't be affected by them.

[Caralis]

Hi Ciml! this way it defenetly makes more sense. Anyway: so far I don't think I have ever been banned for such checkings...so far! ;)

Thank you all for the answers!

[cornwall]

Caralis

If you do a search on "site search" on WebmasterWorld there have been a number of discussions on how (or perhaps maybe how) Google checks on who is using software to check rankings

[Caralis]

Thanks Cornwall! I just tried the "site search" and found many interesting discussions. Thought this was a new one but...

[Caralis]

OK: I went through many topics and now I can see things clearer, but probably... still far from having a good solution to the problem.

A little résumé:

Google can block my IP (any of you incurred in this misfortune? never happened to me!) for exceeding in N of queries to his database.

Yahoo does it for an excessive N of queries (more than 10 per day)

Possible solutions:

1. Google API: I gave it a look and I do not know if it will be possible to customize it in a way that it will allow me to have search results that will display the site position for a good number of kws. Anyone experienced it succesfully? feed-back would be more than welcomed!

2. To do the rank check with AOL, for ex, that provides almost the same Google's results.

3. Customize softwares (TOPDOG, Agentwebranking...) to order them to do the queries to the SEs in a longer period of time (ex. query for kw A and 30 seconds later query for kw B etc), such that Engines might think that the search is from a person and not from a software. Anybody customized this kind of softwares (you can also stickymail me).

4. Human search...too long. Checking the rankings for 200/300 sites and each optimized for 100/200 kws, is something close to impossible.

5. Educate customers that log analysis could be a more interesting option than the mere statistic of page rankings.

Thank you to all the patient readers and sorry for the length!

[ciml]

That makes sense, Caralis. I agree with your idea 5, there's no point running 400 rank checks. Search engines are for searching, server logs are for traffic analysis.

Anyway, if you don't have time to check a page's rank by hand, do you have time to act on the results?

[Caralis]

This is the point: time. You can go through a certain number of kws for a certain number of sites, but that wouldn't be possible for all of the sites and all of the kws. I do not have a 100% valid solution. Maybe testing a new service: creating a group of people who have the aim to teach customers how to read their web logs and take profit of it.

And what would you do? :))

[ciml]

I check (and have people check) some rankings each month but in the context of looking at the results, the pages that come up the site I'm involved in, and the competition.

It may be different in other engines, but the vanity "look where I am for 400 phrases" thing doesn't excite me. It's different if there's quality time to be spent on those 400 phrases, but in that case checking by hand shouldn't be a problem.

[Caralis]

"I check (and have people check) some rankings each month but in the context of looking at the results, the pages that come up the site I'm involved in, and the competition."

So I! I am talking about checking customer's positioning. There are non vanity implications, only customers who want to know how are positioned in SEs. The point is just that there is no time to provide them the results unless using softwares. It's impossible to manage 200 sites with "only humans" working after them.