Accuracy of GoogleRankings.com

MikeHopley · Jan 5th, 2008, 11:58

How accurate is GoogleRankings.com?

I was just doing some research on my competitors. I found that badminton-information.com appears as the 13th result on my Google search for "badminton", but GoogleRankings.com reckons that it holds position 95.

What's going on? Which should I believe? The former suggests a far more serious competitive threat than the latter.

It would be useful to understand this, because I've started to use GoogleRankings.com to record my SE rankings, so that I can present sponsors with records of sustained high rankings and demonstrate that my pages are rising through the rankings.

These data are very convenient -- I needn't sift through Google manually -- but I'm concerned that they may not be accurate.

(Note: Google has stopped issuing SOAP API keys. If you don't already have one, you can't use the GoogleRankings.com position tracking service.)

Rakuli · Jan 5th, 2008, 14:27

Do you have a google account of some description?

Google are moving towards a targeted search, if you're logged into google (gmail or another of their many programs) whereby results are sorted and prioritised based on that user and their history/location etc... It could be that your search is picking up results based on your preferences which would obviously be badminton.

I read about this in an Australian Business magazine -- ".net"

I am unsure how much truth there was in the article but there were statements from Google execs..

Have you tried to searching through a proxy to see if the order changes?

MikeHopley · Jan 5th, 2008, 15:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rakuli

Google are moving towards a targeted search, if you're logged into google ... It could be that your search is picking up results based on your preferences

Good thinking! I do indeed use several Google services: gmail, analytics, calendar, maps...

I'll look into this.

MikeHopley · Jan 5th, 2008, 15:30

Well, I signed out of Google. I also went to Google.com instead of Google.co.uk (duh!).

This made a difference. Instead of rank 13, the website appeared at rank 23.

GoogleRankings thinks it's at rank 94, however. Strange.

Mitchelle Johnson · Feb 19th, 2008, 08:24

Hi Mike, you said i checked my website rank was 13 in google.co.uk and rank 23 on google.com first thing is that google results are location specific so this difference is obvious. but secondly, you mentioned about ranking given by googleranings.com then results from this website are not always correct........