Rediscover Google's free ranking checker!

Nowadays we're searching via toolbar, personalized homepage, or in the browser address bar by typing in "google" to get the search box, typing in a search query using "I feel lucky" functionality, or -my favorite- typing in google.com/search?q=free+pizza+service+nearby.

Old fashioned, uncluttered and nevertheless sexy user interfaces are forgotten, and pretty much disliked due to the lack of nifty rounded corners. Luckily Google still maintains them. Look at this beautiful SERP:

It's free of personalized search, wonderful uncluttered because the snippets appear as tooltip only, results are nicely numbered from 1 to 1,000 on just 10 awesome fast loading pages, and when I've visited my URLs before I spot my purple rankings quickly.

http://google.com/ie?num=100&q=keyword1+keyword2 is an ideal free ranking checker. It supports &filter=0 and other URL parameters, so it's a perfect tool when I need to lookup particular search terms.

Mass ranking checks are totally and utterly useless, at least for the average site, and penalized by Google. Well, I can think of ways to semi-automate a couple queries, but honestly, I almost never need that. Providing fully automated ranking reports to clients gave SEO services a more or less well deserved snake oil reputation, because nice rankings for preselected keywords may be great ego food, but they don't pay the bills. I admit that with some setups automated mass ranking checks make sense, but those are off-topic here.

By the way, Google's query stats are a pretty useful resource too.

Stumble It!

Post it to del.icio.us