The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Benchmarking Current Rankings

People really love to check their search rankings. Many companies want to use this as a measurement of SEO progress over time, but it is a bit problematic, for a variety of reasons. Here is a summary of the major problems with rank checking:

• Google results are not consistent:

  • Different geographies (even in different cities within the United States) often give different results.

  • Different data centers give different results (and you can hit multiple data centers from a single location at different times).

  • Results are personalized for logged-in users based on their search histories.

  • No rank checker can monitor and report all of these inconsistencies (at least, not without scraping Google hundreds of times from all over the world with every possible setting).

• The Google API rarely matches up to what anyone sees in the search results:

  • It appears to match up only on very heavily trafficked, consistent search results; anything mid-tail or long tail is invariably inaccurate.

  • It is extremely slow to update, so even though news results or geographic results might be mixed in (or even new sites or pages that have a large amount of recent link growth), the API won’t update for days or sometimes weeks.

• Obsessing over rankings (rather than traffic) can result in poor strategic decisions:

  • When sites obsess over rankings for particular keywords, the time and energy they expend on those few keyphrases often produces far less value than would have been produced if they had spent ...