Google Strikes WebPosition!

I have long used, and often described in class, a rank checking program called Web Position Gold. The software does many things beyond checking ranking positions, but I have never used other features, nor advocated their use. I have found this a very handy program for evaluating how well the search engine optimization and marketing techniques that we teach are working in practice. I have used it only periodically, perhaps only on a monthly basis, for any given site, in part to avoid overuse that would attract the attention of the search engines, and in part because one can obsess over rankings to no good end. Nevertheless, I find it very useful to occasionally see how my rankings on different sites are standing up on the web.

Google has never liked any of these programs becuause they can eat up so much bandwidth and processing capacity, but the only program they have ever specifically identified as something they disapprove of (at least as far as I have seen) is Web Position. Recently, they appear to have disabled the program completely. When I run the program against any of the sites I check, there are no Google results returned!

As a replacement, I have turned to RankChecker, an application that is an add-on to the Firefox browser and available from SEOBook at no charge (for now, they reserve the right to begin charging for it in the future). This is a web site with a number of good tools available and some good information about search engine marketing. It is definitely worth taking a look at if you are looking for tools to use to evaluate your web site performance.