WELL Well well … What I am about to discuss will make a lot of webmasters very happy and at the same time many ‘Search Engine Ranking Report’ companies are about to go out of business!
It seems that Google never ceases to amaze us and the Google Webmaster team have recently launched a services within the Google Webmaster Central that is going to revolutionize the search engine ranking industry!
Need to check your Google rankings? Well, checking Google rankings just got a hole lot easier! Want to know how?
Just follow these steps:
1) Signup for an account at Google Webmaster Central
2) Submit your website
3) Verify your website by uploading a Google generated verification file
4) That’s it! Now (within your Google webmaster account) just surf to /Statistics/Top search queries/ and be prepared to be amazed with what you are about to see! :)
Google is (and has been) tracking and saving your rankings all along! You can view your present and past Google rankings and even download the entire data within a .cvs excel sheet. Simply amazing! Thank you Google!
This is what the interface looks like (I just picked one of my many websites - www.hawaiiflower.com)
Notice that you can also look back in time - 1 week ago, 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, the month before….and so on.
Notice also that they show you the Top search queries and where your site was positioned at that point in time (even 293 positions deep!!). And something very cool … notice the right hand column with Top clicked queries! Google is telling you what their uses searched to reach your listing and actually clicked on it! This is incredible data.
Not only that, but they also show you Geo targeted search data! (man, this just keeps getting better!)
Ok, and now this is really going to blow you away!! Google image ranking data is also available!!
How about that!? Now this is something very new that Google webmaster Central has recently released.
This will be a big concern for companies that rely on so called ‘Search Engine Ranking Report’ tools. What happens when Yahoo! and MSN follow suit? There will no longer be a need for these ranking report software companies as the search engines will give you the “real rankings”. Furthermore, if you have ever performed ranking reports, you will know that the search engines (especially Google and Yahoo!) will block you if you make too many requests on any given day from the same IP.
Actually, Google is very clever to make this data visible to webmasters as this will now eliminate the need for Google rank checking and significantly reduce the (increasing) load on Google by these so called “Search Engine Ranking Tools”.
I hope this post will find a lot of you webmasters out there (and SEO companies! ;) ) who have always been challenged with the head breaking task of check and recording rankings over time for your website(s).
Do let me know what you think of this news! :)
I had noticed the increased quantity of information but hadn’t explored as you have just how rich it is. Thanks for highlighting this.