Most SE Rankings Tools Give False Results

Because they're fed week-old data by the SEs?

[jastra]

I bought a famous SEO tool suite. Part of the package was a tool that gets "current" rankings for your targeted keywords/search terms.

But when I compared the tool's results with a manual audit, the tool was off by 5-10 rankings on most keywords.

I did make sure that I was getting one page, 10 results per page, on both automatic and manual searches.

I did the same thing on 5 or 6 freebie tools. Same phenomenon.

So, my question is: are ALL these tools this useless? To a client, ranking on page 2 (when they're really on page 1) can determine whether they're happy with you, or not.

Looks to me like all these tools are operating on week-old information. Therefore the only true ranking sampling in the manual method. Anybody else notice this?

Is there a tool out there that give today's SERPs?

[jastra]

Any thoughts on this? Or do most of you opt for manual rankings reports?

That method, however, is so excruciatingly mind-numbing I can't even get my 17 year old daughter to do it when I offer her $12 per hour. Maybe I should outsource...

[mjtaylor]

When you do it manually, do you use Scoogle? Or GoogleRankings?

I use a combination of those ... and I would love to go to software that automates it all ... but Google specifically says we shouldn't do that ... :(

[jastra]

mjtaylor,

Sorry for the delay-- I almost gave up on piquing anybody's interest on this. Thanks for the reply.

I didn't know about #*$!. Thanks for the tip. I tried it and see that one should stick with the 20 results per page to get truer results. 50 and 100 per page have the same issue. It clusters results from all over in one place.

Re: GoogleRankings. I got an API back a couple of years ago. Used it once. But I stopped-- I got concerned about using it for multiple sites. I mean it looked as if that practice was against the TOS and Google would not be amused. You know anything about that? If it's OK I'll scratch around and find it.