I use it almost every day & it typically works for me.
Whenever it doesn't, we quickly fix it.
With Google you may need to disable Google Instant from the Google preferences page.
Never seems to pick up rankings and when it does, it seems to be incorrect.<
If you read (gasp, actually read) the instructions on the download page it explains how it works & why there can be variances in the data
3 things that may cause results to differ when you use Rank Checker vs when you search Google directly.
- personalization - if personalization is on then the results you see might be different than the results other see. This is true even if you are not logged into an account results can be altered by your recent prior search queries. To remove personalization bias, we offer an option that turns it off.
- clustering - to send Google less queries we grab 100 results per page. If 2 pages from the same site are in the search results they will be clustered together, so in many cases a low ranking page will see rankings shown even lower on our tool due to clustering. If you add &num=100 to the address bar in Google the results should be fairly well aligned with our tool.
- datacenter and algorithm changes - at different times of day your query might access different datacenters, and algo changes also happen all the time...Google did around 450 algorithm adjustments in 2007.
Even if the numbers do not exactly line up they are still good for helping you see the general ranking trends.
I think I remember someone saying it needed a makeover, or was having one.<
Please feel free to point to the source when you are trashing someone's work. No need to do the "some people say" crap. I may have said there is stuff we could do to improve it and we were testing some stuff...but that is mostly around adding more features. The hard part on that front is that the more features we add the harder it is to maintain & the increased complexity leads to more complaints. Not a big deal if the complaints are from paying customers, but when you put complex things in front of freetards bad things happen!
I will say that since it was made primarily with my taste & goals in mind it isn't perfect for everyone, but it is better than most the paid options. Advanced Web Ranking is an awesome rank checking tool that has a ton of features if you want more of them...but I have an issue with how complex we can make a free tool before freetards light us up on the public relations front for their own incompetence.
If we went to paid only we would be able to add a lot more features.
