Ask HN: How do you manage keyword ranking history?

[ScottWhigham]

I've struggled with this for a while - how (i.e. what tools/techniques) do people manage their keyword ranking history for their main search terms?

Example: I want to track my rank history in a table with columns, "SearchEngine", "PositionInOrganicSearchResults", "GooglePageRank". What tools, other than Mechanical Turk or other manual means, exist to track this info that won't run us afoul of the search engine's TOS? I don't want any black-hat software - I just want to figure out how to track that info in a legitimate manner.

I'd like to check keywords/phrases on a minimum of 100 major terms, 300 minor terms, and 1000+ very minor terms.

Thanks for any advice

[_bbks]

Google and Yahoo have search API's that you can use for these tasks without breaking TOS. Most of the software apps around use the API's if you give them your key, or you may prefer to write your own script to use the API's.

Otherwise I guess you could just use normal search from your script, but keep it slow, the kind of speed you'd go if you were doing it manually, and leave it running until its done? depends how often you need to check the stats.

[ScottWhigham → _bbks]

Thanks. I've considered it but honestly I have so much code that I maintain already... I'll check for some of the tools - the problem that I've had is knowing which tool's marketing copy to trust. None of them will come out and say, "We'll let you do stuff you aren't supposed to!" but I've read that many actually can get you into trouble.

[_bbks → ScottWhigham]

You'd be surprised how easy it is to setup something useful, my in house one is about 250~ lines (ruby) connecting with some of my own API's too for config and reporting.

Previously I used advancedwebranking.com which worked well, but I only needed the rankings reports which I then needed to integrate into my own applications, so there was very little code to produce to get the functionality I needed.

[ScottWhigham → _bbks]

I think that the ranking reports that the advancedwebranking.com site offers are probably what I need - thanks for the suggestion. If you have a referral code, pass it along and you'll get credit if I buy!