Please forgive me if this is now considered an ignorant question but I've been running a couple tools here to get my website's position in the serps and they keep hanging when checking in Google. I decided to look into getting an API so I could build a script to check for myself....but in doing so I've come across many places on the web that state that Google no longer allows people to run automatic queries to check for a website's Search Engine Results positioning for keywords. Is this true????? How in the world then is anyone supposed to get a handle on whether the work they are doing to please Google is working or not????? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, T.
Seriously if a man works hard for good results of his site it is obvious that he keeps checking the rank of his site. How can google hate the?
Geeze! I understand the reasons they probably do it...you know...work load and all that but that doesn't change the fact that it's quite annoying. It increases the time it takes to create content that they consider to be superior in the first place by making it more difficult to determine whether or not your changes/edits help or hurt your rankings. All in an effort to prevent people from "reverse engineering" their precious algorithm I guess...
if we all had hundreds of little automated routines checking our positions hourly it'd be a hell of a lot of work work for their servers so can understand why they are doing it. The answer would be an SERP api incorporated into Webmaster tools with a finite number of calls a day. Generally Google are happy to give away the "good stuff" via Webmaster tools because they know it's the website owner doing the checking.
Seobook's Rankchecker which is a Firefox add-on. Type in site, keywords and it'll tell you where you rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing. It also allows you to check Google in other countries.
What about scraping results for a site: search - I needed to pull the sitemap into a spreadsheet but wondered if this could be done with a tool?