I was reading a recent interview with Matt Cutts, and he said rank checking software is not allowed by Google: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/10/google-answers-some-tricky-questions I use http://rankingcheck.com/. I don't think it would qualify as "rank-checking software" since it's a website. Can anyone clarify this?
No it is still considered software. The search engines do not like any automated tool that uses their resources. It is not risky to use such tools though. The worst that could happen is that your ip could get banned from searching. It would never affect your site's rankings.
Rank can be checked by Google Webmaster Tools as i know. Any software that using google search engine, need to be registered and allowed to do so, like Google search API need to be registered, otherwise Google can ban IP.
So the worse situation will be blocked by google. But a lot of people are still having dynamic ip nowadays. So I don't think google will reinforce this.
They just ban your IPs when you search There would be some captcha codes before the banning. In my case, search engine genie is my tool to check keyword rankings but I don't know if the Big G qualifies it.