How do I know where my site rank?

[webguru]

How do I know where my site rank?

If i own a web hosting website, I type in:

web hosting

Google returns 1,000,000 hits. How do I know where my site rank? Of course, I'm not going to click on every page until I hit 1,000,000 to find out.

[tigger]

Well you could use an automated ranking program, but not on google she doesn’t like it, try running it on AOL they use the same results you could then check on google by hand

[dmorison]

Hi Webguru,

It will be hard to find it exactly, but do the following to get an approximate fix.

Grab yourself the Google toolbar and figure out your approximate pagerank.

Then, do a Google search on your keyword to get the first page of results.

In another browser window, load up the first result for your keyword and get their Pagerank (from the toolbar).

Back the window with the result in, and click on "Next" to get the second page of results. Now look at the Google URL in the address bar. You should see "startat=10". Change that to "startat=900" and hit return.

Now take a URL from that page and load it into the other browser window you have open and get the pagerank.

If you're lucky, this second page, from 900 positions down the SERP has a lower pagerank than you. Assuming that it does, you can get an approximate fix on where your page features, although it won't be that easy to find because pagerank is logarithmic I believe.

Hope this helps!

[takagi]

There is no option to find the 'site rank'. As a matter of fact, Google doesn't rank sites in the SERP but pages.

You can only see the first 1000 results. So if your site is not in the top 1000, you won't find it with searching for this keyword. First of all, you should check if your site is indexed or not. Search for the www.mydomain.com and verify if it is there.

If so, you could change the settings of Google to show 100 pages per search instead of the default 10. To do so, go on the page www.google.com to <Preferences> and change <Number of Results> to 100 and click on the <Save Preferences> button. Now you search again for your keyword, and use CTRL-F (if you use Windows) to search for www.mydomain.com on the first page. If it's not there, go to the bottom of the first page and click on 'next' and repeat this until you find it.

BTW, I see a much higher number of results
web hosting - 4,020,000
"web hosting" - 3,070,000
webhosting - 2,040,000

[deejay]

takagi took the words right out of my mouth. That's the fastest manual method I've found too.

dmorison, sorry, but the method you suggest won't work. Page Rank from the toolbar is only one factor in the Google algorythm and bears no direct relationship to a page's position in the SERPs for any given search term.

[dmorison]

It worked for me on my nowhere to be found in the Top few hundred but PR4 site...

[deejay]

I'm afraid that would be a coincidence.

SERPs are not returned in PR order. They are returned in relevance to search term order.

If your theory were correct Merriam Webster would top just about all the SERPs for single word searches with their (from memory) PR9.... they are a dictionary after all.... and my PR3 pages would have no place beating out PR6s the way they do.

PR tends to be a relatively heavily weighted factor... but it is just one factor.

[webguru]

Hey takagi,

oh, i was just giving an example. my website is not a web hosting either. I'm just using 'web hosting' and '1,000,000 hits' as an example.

[dmorison]

Deejay,

It is only the homepage of Merriam Webster that has high page rank, individual keyword result pages do not.

Anyway, i'm happy that the binary chop I did to find position was a coincidence!

Cheers.

[takagi]

Maybe i should add something to my previous posting.

As a matter of fact, Google doesn't rank sites in the SERP but pages.

Google will usually show one or two results per site. My guess is, that the first page of a site in the SERP will determine the ranking of the one or two results of this site in a SERP.

And webguru, you're right. You wrote "If i own a web hosting website .." but I didn't notice the 'if' in your message.

<edit>Style code problem fixed.</edit>

[edited by: takagi at 9:57 am (utc) on April 20, 2003]

[deejay]

:) dmorison, you are right of course about MW... but it is a handy illustrative example that gets people thinking.

takagi, where Google indents a second page from a site within a SERP it is an indication that the second page would also rank within that page of results.

eg, for search term widget: widget.com/page1 ranks no. 3 and widget.com/page2 ranks no.13.

In standard 10 per page results, Google would show widget.com/page1 on the first SERP page at position 3, and widget,com/page2 on the second SERP page at position 13.

If you change your search options to display 20 per page, Google will show widget.com/page1 at position 3 with widget.com/page2 indented immeidately under at position '3a'.

It's a good way for Google to indicate that a site might be of added value in that it has more than one relevant page, while keeping the SERPs nice and tidy and un-spammy looking.

[takagi]

That's what I like about this forum. So much to learn. Just checked what deejay wrote in the previous message. And wooo! She is right. I never understood how Google decided to show a second result or not. But that also means that for your exact ranking, you should go back to 10 results per page. If your page is #5 on the SERP with 20 results per page, you could be #4 on the 10 results per page because of this 3a result. Thanx.

<edit>Gender adjusted. See next message. Sorry deejay!</edit>

[edited by: takagi at 12:18 pm (utc) on April 20, 2003]

[deejay]

*immediately checks all her girly bits.. present and accounted for... and sighs with relief*