AWR

This ones a good one – Advanced Web Rankings – CLICK HERE for more info

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I’ve tried a lot of ways to check rankings in search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo and Bing) over the years and generally speaking I’ve been dissappointed with most if not all of them.

So much so, that we’ve resorted for many clients to manually checking them / and or developing our own tools to ensure the results we get are what the customer is seeing too. The problem with this type of rankings check is how much time it consumes in the studio. The problem with a lot of automatic website rank checkers of course is that they could well be software packages that violate Google webmaster guidelines for instance.

It automatically runs a ranking report checking keyword positions in Google, and automatically sends me a keyword rank check report via email with details of each keyword position (and over time, this generates a cool graph of ranking activity).

It’s a pretty comprehensive tool and it certainly seems to perform very well, with a good support forum too to ask any questions (although there seems to be quite a bit of moderation needed in that forum, quite a lot of spam in it at the moment guys)!

A very neat feature if you run one site is the sheer number of search engines you can can track your rankings on too (thousands of them from what I can see) – not that I bother with search engine submission at all these days of course.

The keyword position reports too are quite comprehensive and you can run as many search engine ranking reports and projects (multiple websites and rank checks) as you wish.

It’s fairly intuitive and easy to set up and use after you play about with it, although trialing it I found I’m having a few problems sending email reports (although I think that may be just me and the way I have it sending emails out).

The software also can check your pagerank and alexa rank too (if either of them are important to you) and can keep an eye on competitiors rankings too.

If you want to trial it free for 30 days, you can download it here. It’s available for Mac & PC and is desktop based.

Note – I’m still not that obsessed with individual keyword rankings – I’m much more interested in creating good content on a site and aquiring backlinks as naturally as possible – and then unlocking that domain authority by publishing even more content, but in competitive sectors where the linkerati seem to be thin on the ground, for specific keyword phrases, linkbuilding is still a must of course.

I’ve been testing out the rank check tool AWR Website Ranking on a small personal site (after being advised it does not break Google’s guidelines)

First of all, I would like to put one thing aside. There is no way that Google or any other search engine can ban you for using our software.  And this is because for Google, AWR looks like a regular web browser. We send the EXACT data web browsers send. There is no way for Google to find out that you are using a tool like AWR.  And even if they knew, they have no way of knowing your website domain. AWR sends queries that only contain the Keywords, NOT the URL. It then searches the URLs in the results Google sent back.  This means they have no way of making a connection between the IP address of your computer, where AWR runs from, and your website.  If this was possible, then I could fake this information to look like my competitor domain and then get him banned!

…and the results seem pretty cool. That is to say, it does what I need it to do.

Check out our  SEO for beginners and our linkbuilding tips tutorial if you’re interested in finding out more.

Do let me know if:

  1. You obsessively check your rankings in search engines
  2. What tool you use (if any) to monitor your keyword rank positions

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