Rank Checker Feedback and Questions

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the great tool. I've been experiencing the same issues as some of the other users (CleverChaps on November 10, 2008 08:02 PM) lately in the previous threads. I'm receiving all hyphens for Google although I know my domain ranks well for the keywords that I check. This happened roughly one week ago. Before that, it was working fine.

I have uninstalled installed multiple times (5+), but notice that my preset is still there when I re-install. I've upgraded to Firefox 3.0.4 and am running on a Mac. Any ideas on how to fix? Have I been blocked?

Please help! Love the tool.

I wish I knew what was causing that for a few people. could you maybe save your presets as new text files outside the tool, and see if the issue is maybe within one of them?

I'm one of those people getting hyphens for Google ranks. I installed rank checker on a new computer and its working fine. I just can't get it to work on my laptop. Only hyphens for Google. If anyone figures out how to solve the issue please post here I'm sure it'll help a few people. Thanks.

Hi Aaron, yes, I'm logged into a Google account when checking Google.co.uk - is this likely to make a difference? Google.com rankings are working fine.

Running latest FF3, XP Pro, latest version of Rank Checker and have uninstalled/reinstalled to no avail. :(

could you see if clearing out your preset files helps?

Hi Aaron,
great tool, thanks.

CaityLady321 reported problem with apostrophes in keywords on June 02, 2008 05:43 PM.
It looks like it is still not solved and all sets of keywords with aphostrophes don't work.
Is is possible to fix it?
Thanks again!

I just tested it and it worked for me for a keyword with an apostrophe in it.

I love this tool and have been using it for many months, but the results it finds don't match searching by hand. I don't use personalized results on hand or rank checker, put the &num=100 behind the url and the SERP rankings are still off.

used cars sioux falls rank checker shows 14 for billionauto.com, but it's actually 7.

sioux falls sd car dealers rank checker shows 134 for billionauto.com, but it's actually 1.

Help. I want to keep using this but I can't right now with these results.

Can you look at AOL rankings and compare it to those?

Keep in mind that Google has many data centers and alters their algorithms frequently...it is getting harder to "check rankings" because there is a certain amount of flux to it

for billionauto.com:

used cars sioux falls, 6 in aol, 7 in google, 14 in rankchecker

sioux falls sd car dealers 1 in aol, 1 in google, 134 in rankchecker

I will try to look into this kokopoko

Hi Aaron,

In October I mentioned some problems with Google.com.br SEO Tool and portuguese words (eg: Passeio Recreativo and Passeio Recreativo para Cães), when I had just hyphens against first page positions with manual search.

I have already uninstal / instal this extension, I'm using the latest Firefox version, but the problem persists.

Could you imagine what could be wrong?

tks
Andre

I am not sure Andre, but we might have a fix for it coming out soon....we are working on a new version right now.

Hi Aaron,

Back on October 11th. I posted about some issues I was having they are similar to the issues kokopoko is having.

The ranking is off on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

But in addition, rank checker is counting local search results on Yahoo and Google as a ranked search result.

For example check out this example, the website is alleghenyhealth.com now search for "chiropractor brackenridge" in Google, the is sites not on the first page (expect in local search results). Now use rank check to check for this and it'll say the site is #1. But it's really not - it's only #1 in the local search results.

Any ideas?

we might have a solution for this out soon...am talking to the developer about looking for some solutions.

Great thanks Aaron, you're the best!

Looks like the rank check was updated as I'm not seeing the local search results bug any more.

Thanks, well done guys! This will really make it much easier when I'm going over my client's positioning stats - rather than having to look up keywords that have local search results by hand.

That was our major goal of the last update. :)

Thanks for looking into it.

Aaron, I have just checked the new release of Rank Checker and the problem with portugueses words (eg: passeio recreativo para cães) are ok now.

The only difference occurs when I compare Rank Checker result with manual search with &num=10, 50 or other number besides 100. Could you explain me why the result position changes?

Tks

look for the "data conflict issues" header on this page
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Aaron Wall on November 17, 2008 05:40 PM
"I just tested it and it worked for me for a keyword with an apostrophe in it."

Hi Aaron,
I checked it and in fact it works until preset is not saved. Once it is saved and opened - it doesn't work.

Is is possible for you to check and fix it?

Thanks in advance,
Marcin K.

Aaron,

At the moment the preset list becomes extensive, it`s hard to manage it. It would be interesting if the Preset list could be sorted / organized by date or name, and have a search tool.

Tks

Interesting observation MarcinK. I've continued to have the problem with apostrophes. Typically if the list has an apostrophe, it just keeps on running once it gets to the end of the list and the "Export Results to CSV" button stays grayed out. Or, when I do export, it only exports the first three keywords into the csv file. My solution is just to exclude all special characters, and it works fine from there.

I haven't seen any other comments on this, but with the new update I no longer get results for Yahoo. Do I need to just uninstall/reinstall, or is there some other fix for this? Anyone else experiencing the same issue?

I have the same issue with Yahoo. But what's strange is if I set it for another country it works fine. Just united states broken?

We are trying to get the Yahoo! part fixed...I am running into that same issue with no US Yahoo! results, but the other countries and other search engines work fine.

OK, glad to hear it's a known issue. Thanks, Aaron, for fielding all of these comments and for all that you guys do. This tool has made a huge impact on my work and it is really amazing that you offer it for free and continue to improve it. Thanks again.

Oops! Somehow I managed to overlook the previous comments about Yahoo!

Glad to see you're working on it. Very much appreciated, Aaron.

Hi, Aaron.
I have to reinstall my FireFox. If I re-install my adds on, will i lose the historical data of my reports? Is there any way to keep these report? Where I can find them?

Thank you very much in advance,
Juan Pablo

I am not sure if you will keep the data Juan. Here is where you can find it though on windows XP

c: / documents and settings / my username / application data / mozilla / firefox / profiles / someweirdstring / rankchecker.sqlite

I think application data was a hidden folder
and
someweirdstring is like brm9cmz3.default

----

and on Windows Vista it is located at something like

c: , users, owner, appdata, roaming, mozilla, firefox, profiles, weird string

Now this is odd. Regarding Yahoo US, it still isn't working for me, but I just noticed that after I export the history, occasionally ONE keyword term in a file will have a Yahoo result. Thought you might want to pass that on to whomever is troubleshooting this! =)

So I ran rank checker today and yahoo us is working....did the problem get fixed? Great tool by the way....Thanks Aaron

Glad to hear it is working for you. :)

This tool saves me so much time. I love it. I only have one problem with it.

I have dozens of websites and I have all my sites' keywords listed in one preset file. Once I've collected all the results I export them, then copy them to my Excel file which keeps a daily record of the rankings.

When I want to add a new keyword I can only add it to the end of the list, so the new keyword would usually not be listed next to the keywords for that site.

Is it possible to edit the preset file to insert keywords into certain places rather than just at the end of the list, either through the program or by opening it as a text file from its location on the computer? Where is it stored?

One other thing, is it possible to insert 2 letter keywords as one of my main keywords is just two characters?

When you export the keywords cant you sort that list in Excel by URL?

Tried reinstalling Firefox and rankchecker and still no go on the US listings for Yahoo. Not sure how the other person's works?

Yahoo US is still not working for me. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the extension, and no dice. It seems to be working again for some people, so I'm not sure of the problem. Any suggestions?

And, while I'm commenting, thanks for this great tool, Aaron. Saves me a ton of time.

Hi Aaron,
is there any chance to fix it?

keywords with apostrophes work until they are saved as presets. once you save them and then open a list from presets it never finishes to check positioning and data results are not saved.

Thanks!

We are working on another project right now...but plan on updating this fairly soon. :)

Hey Aaron -
I had an idea for a little tweak that would be helpful. In the next iteration, it'd be great if in the Rankchecker window, next to the Start and Export Results to CSV buttons, there was an "Export History to CSV" button as well. I always use presets, so I find myself accidentally exporting the current results only when I meant to do history. It'd be nice not to have to renavigate into the presets to export the history. =)
Just a thought. I hope you guys can figure out the Yahoo thing soon, that's of course a bigger issue as it removes a third of the functionality for US folks like me. =) Thanks again!

Sorry to be lazy about reading all comments if this has been suggested:

I open the presets and have accidentally hit the (x) delete a number of times instead of selecting my preset.

Can you add a confirmation or something, instead of having it erasing my keyword list?

It will transform me from :( to :)

Thanks,

Bill

We will try to add that pretty soon Bill.

Not seeing any results from Yahoo

Hi Aaron, nice tool. Good to keep it simple and efficient.
I have some questions about the data. Please bear if I missed the answers in your early replies.

1) The data varies largely when checked in different locations. E.g. keyword ranking No. 1 in Australia appear outside 200 in USA. Besides personalized search on/off and google data location, any other major reasons?
2) For a keyword, a sub-domain is shown in "Google.com URL", does it mean the sub-domain ranks better than the main domain, or the main domain ranks far out for this keyword?
3) It does not show Yahoo and Live results. Any way to fix it? Is using Firefox/3.0.5.

Thanks and appreciated.

#1 localization is a big part of the relevancy algorithms
#2 sub-domain ranks higher
#3 are you using the most recent version of rank checker? if not, you can upgrade it and see if that helps.

I havent tested that tool, and not sure if this is related, but when were talking about localization of the search results/international SERPs, I noticed something interesting a while back:

When I type in www yahoo com (from my computer which is located in Germany just as myself), Ill always get redirected to de.yahoo.com ...and if I type in linkdomain:www... there, I'll only get a split of the links that www yahoo com will show me using the same command (even for German websites!).

It's easy to change that (by simply clicking on the US flag which takes you to yahoo.com - so much for .com = commercial not us ;)), just in case anyone's using yahoo to check links from outside the US.

Helllo Aaron

Not seen this problem mentioned before but I'm not able to resize the colums in the window. Any chance of having a look to see if its just a problem I'm finding

Thanks

Mally

I am able to re-size the window.

I know the previous version worked for yahoo.com before this new one. Can we somehow revert back to it?

We will try to get this fixed before the month is out, but it is not easy for us to do a roll back.

RankChecker is one of my most valuable tools, but it still needs major improvements. I'm not sure why none of my previously-suggested ideas were incorporated in the months since, but since they are still really needed, I'll mention them again (and add some more):

- part of what Google picks up on appears to be regularity of searches. a simple randomization tool that allows a time range to be set would certain help throw off the scent when they are watching for users to ban for regularity of searching.
- apostrophes often cause the program to choke (preset saves are truncated, etc)...and yet, search terms with apostrophes are completely legit. this can't be that tough to fix.
- why limit searches to the top 200? as long as you're going to build the tool, raise the cap to 500. one still needs to know when their sites first appear in the index and to track their upward progress. and some sites are simply stubborn. it lowers the value of the tool by simply putting an arbitrary cap at 200. fine, make it the default, but allow user control up to 500 if desired.
- better management of presets and keyphrases within them is needed. confirm deletion instead of just having them disappear when an X get stray-clicked. allow reordering of presets and keyphrases within presets. some of us function better in an environment when things can be alphabetized. others have reasons for ordering by other patterns. the lack of tools here costs a lot of extra time...almost like forcing a speed typist to hunt and peck.
- a dream feature would be to "set it and forget it"...to hit start and have it roll thru all the presets over the period of an hour or 90 mins (plenty slow so as not to be snagged) and come back to find the results exported to a spreadsheet. Since I check 30-40 sites a day, this would be a massive time-savings. I realize this is a commercial-level feature, but I'd be willing to pay for it.

All that said, this is still the most valuable SEO tool I use. I'd just like to see a major update to resolve some of these long-standing hassles.

I updated to Rank Checker 1.6 but I keep getting the Thank You For Updating Rank Checker page in a separate tab every time I open Firefox. Is this deliberate behavior? Happy to donate if that's what I need to do to get rid of this. I am running Windows XP with Firefox 3.0.5

Sorry about that clivewalker. It should be fixed now if you update it again.

Hi Aaron,

Greetings from Hamburg, Germany.
My "Scheduled Tasks" do not run, the presets do not perform.

I have ten lists with everyone round about hundred keywords items in the presets and delay of 2.

But the last update was at December 18.
I have put an interval of 1 day to test, but i get it run only manually by the menu item "run".

I have keep open the firefox also and i run windows vista not as administrator.

Have you any advice why "Scheduled Tasks" don´t get any results. When i export the cvs i get only my rankings up to 18. December.

Thank you for the great tool!

Hans

We should be doing some testing and updating before the month is out...currently we are building another tool

Just can't seem to get Yahoo to work right. The new update worked for the first eight keywords and then crashed. It has not come back.

It really has not crashed, it just returns zeros that are not what you would get from a live search.

Yeah, the new update didn't change anything as far as Yahoo is concerned, I assume it wasn't supposed to.

As an aside, if this is true, through Rankchecker I am using enough energy to run a small power plant!
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134...

OK, maybe it's too early in the AM, but I can't get this to work. I installed it when I had Firefox 2 (and didn't try it). I've now got 3.0.5, running on Mac OS 10.4.9. I open the box, type in a domain and a keyword, and the start button stays greyed out. What's wrong? Does it work with 3? It seems so easy, I can't think what I'm doing wrong. Help!

maybe uninstall and reinstall it? it should work quite intuitively, especially if you watched the video and read the instructions.

Maybe there might also be a conflicting extensions issue?

I would also love to be able to search for google.co.uk rankings. Any idea when it might become available?

Hi Aaron,
I just upgraded to 1.6.2.
google.co.uk works fine here but once I open preset I can see some results already, I click run and I can see that your software overwrites them.
maybe it would be good to have clean screen after preset is open.
I can also see that results are a bit different (usually different is max 1-2 positions) with what I can see directly in google.co.uk results and your script.
Any idea why?

>> the most recent results show right away from the last
>> time the preset was ran...that was a design upgrade.

This particular "design upgrade" absolutely sucks. Sorry, but someone had to say it.

I wish you could implement some of the things I've suggested previously....about 10 ideas that would really help make the tool even closer to perfection.

But this particular one (recent results show right away) is a bad move. At the very least, it should be switchable. It's much harder to track by eye, and wastes a great deal of time.

Perhaps we could use a highlight cell function that highlights where the rank checker is at as it works its way through the keyword list?

If you want a more robust tool (with graphs, etc.) we recommend the combination of Advanced Web Ranking with Advanced Link Manager.

I noticed when you enter a url and leave on a trailing slash eg "http://www.example.co.nz/" it Rankchecker won't let you add your keywords.

Is this something others have issues with?

Its not biggie but but of my employees was saying your tool was broken because she couldn't use your tool and that was the reason why.

Cheers
Aidan

Thanks for the tip Aidan. I will forward that on to the programmer :)

Hi,

Regarding the "most recent results show right away from the last time the preset was ran" part of the update, I didn't know about this when I recently ran a huge preset. I didn't think the software was working properly.

It might be an idea that once it has checked a particular keyword, the text colour of the rank changes. For example if a position has improved it turns green, position drops it turns red and if its the same as before it turns blue. This may help.

Just a thought!

Stil thumbs up, great piece of software.

I love Ronk Checker. (I know it's rank checker, but the image for the A looks like an O). Anyway, I started getting hyphens for G results. Is that because I've ran it too much today on websites? I tried putting proxies in my browser, but that didn't solve it. Any ideas? Should I try Tor?

Are you setting a 5 second delay in between pulling in data?

First of all, thank you so much for such a wonderful free tool! This tool really makes my life easier, but there are a few small tweaks that I would like to suggest:

* A means to move (up or down) the various entries in the Rank Checker window - its much more easier to manage and analyse the keyword list if similar keywords are close together rather than one at the top and the other at the bottom of the window (in case I happen to find a new keyword and add it to list later when the list is already long). So a way to just MOVE various entries up and down the list would help bring related or similar keywords closer together. Simple drag n drop or up/down arrows could resolve the issue.

* Sorting the results - although this can be done inside excel for the csv file, if would be greatly helpful to have it inside the Rank Checker window itself for quick analysis of the results e.g. to see the rank of various keywords in ascending order of ranking. An operation like clicking on a column heading to sort the table according to the values in that column could be a simple solution.

* Selective rank checking - sometimes I add a keyword to the end of a long list of keywords for which Rank Checker has already checked ranks. It would be a waste of time and internet resources to find ranks for all of the keywords in the list again just to find the rank of this ONE new keyword at the end of the list. It would GREATLY help if there was an option to selectively update/check rank of one or more keywords in a list.

Let me know what you think of these. Thanks again for this great little tool Aaron!

On your third point, you could always just check the rank of that keyword by itself without putting it on another list if you just need the rank for it real quick.

You could even put it on the other list, save that list (without checking ranks), and then just check that new word by itself (outside of that other list).

The other points may be addressed soon...though we are working on a couple other tools at the moments.

Hi, Aaron: I have been having problems saving new projects in the tool. I add multiple keywords, save the project, run it and over write it. But when I close the tool and try to export the results, the file is empty, and I can't recover the list of keyword saved. Can you help me with this?
Thanks in advance.
Juan Pablo

Hi Juan
can you try the tool on another computer to see if the issue is isolated to that current install on your computer?

Thanks for the reply..much appreciated.

Robin

A while back I said I keep a list of all my keywords and sites in an excel spreadsheet. I update my ranks on the spreadsheet daily by copying and pasting from the csv file. The problem is when I want to add a new keyword for a site in the middle of the list, the program only allows me to add to the end of the list.

You said:
> When you export the keywords cant you sort that list in Excel by URL?

Which sounded good but I've spent a few hours trying to get it to work but there's all kinds of problems including:

- Results outside the top 200 don't give a site url so some keywords go to the end of the list when they shouldn't. If a keyword goes in and out of the top 200 the list order will change so copying and pasting isn't straightforward.

- I can't keep US sites and UK sites separate.

- I can't order the keywords in a way I want to, such as by importance.

- Each keyword in the existing list needs to be changed around.

- Most importantly, if the highest ranking page of the site changes, so will the order of keywords, so when the ranks column is copied to the archive, the ranks won't match the keyword and it would go unnoticed.

Again I love this tool but being able to import and export or access a file where the saved keyword lists are stored would be extremely useful.

Adam

Hi,

I'm having problems with rank checker. When I open an existing list of keywords, it opens the list with all the previous rankings. If I then click start nothing happens.

Am I do something wrong or is it broken?

thanks.

When you click start it is probably working...it is just that if the rankings have not changed you may not see anything change. We are going to do an update where we visually highlight the updating process at a glance.

Hi Aaron

First of all thanks for creating Rank Checker and making it available for all of us to use, it's been extremely useful and I'm very grateful to you.

I'm having the same problem as sean. I've been using the tool for several months but since yesterday when I open any of my presets the results from my last search are visible and I can't get them to go away. Pressing Run doesn't appear to work and I'm reluctant to reinstall the software in case I lose the historic data.

If I understand your reponse to Sean you're saying that despite the visible evidence to the contrary the process is actually running and the results will change when the rankings themselves change. If this is an upgrade all I can say is I preferred things the way they used to be! It's quite disconcerting to sit and watch the wheel spin and a page of unchanging results. Are you sure there isn't a problem?

Hope this doesn't come across as picky - like I said at the start I'm full of admiration for what you've done - I just thought you'd want to know.

Regards

Dave

We will try to do another update again soon Dave...one that highlights each data point as it updates.

We run a business and many websites in addition to creating free software...and at any given time I am usually working on a couple projects and our programmer is as well.

Thanks for a useful tool. Some UI suggestions and comments:

I'm guessing that the results will never include results from none HTTP/HTTPS resources - the width is tight in the results UI, why not cut the http:// from all results (but you could show the https:// or just replace it with "S " as a type of flag).

As for the immediate display of previous results mentioned above - maybe if they were shown in grey and overwritten in black (possibly bold). The whole results screen could handle being in a smaller font too IMO.

"preset" is a poor name I find for what is a "[saved] group" of links.

Keyword entry using a comma or semi-colon separated list would be good (like the tags for FF bookmarks).

The "delete selected keyword" button looks like an error information flag, just a red X is better, also it deletes the line without setting a selection indication and so the wording is not strictly correct

This is supposed to be constructive, sorry if it sounds quibbling.

Hi Aaron!
Just wanted to thank you for the Yahoo US fix and the other fixes you implemented in the last update. They are much appreciated. Thanks so much for making time in the midst of your other projects to provide such great support for this one for free.

It would be great to have the previous ranking remain in brackets rather than be cleared by the new one. This would allow you to focus on what's changed, which is the most important thing when looking at rankings. Any chance of adding this in a future update?

We might eventually add something like that. But it is a constant battle between creating members only tools, adding features to our public tools, creating new content, boosting conversion rates, etc.

Just a heads up that this plugin conflicts with Rank Checker.

If you find that Rank Checker has stopped working and just hangs, check to see if you have the Relaplayer plagin installed. If you do, just disable it and you will be working again fine.

I don't even recall installing the plug in or what its for so I don;t miss it but I would miss Rank Checker.

Cheers
Mike

thanks for the heads up Mike. :)

Hey, just wanted to comment that I have been running my lists with apostrophes all day, with no hangups! Rankchecker keeps running to the end, and no problems with the exports. Hopefully it keeps it up, but the apostrophe problem seems like it might be fixed!

Great to hear it is working well for you. :)

Apostrophes are still a problem last time I checked.

The presets do not consistently save properly...i.e., the words are out of order after saving and reloading (even after multiple attempts)...leading to the need to delete the preset and create a new one.

Clearing the previous rankings is now better than it was before, but not as good as it originally was. Not everyone searches all the keywords for each URL each time. When just spot-checking like that (i.e., moving from one URL to another in the midst of the search process) the old results are not properly cleared.

There is still no ability to reorder domains (or auto-alphabetize them, which would be even nicer), nor to re-order the search terms within each domain (I don't use alphabetizing within keywords for a domain. I order them by popularity, which I can do manually, but the saving problem listed above causes problems with that).

Hi Aaron,
I just upgraded to a new version - 1.6.4
Could you check if everything is fine with Google UK results, please?
I can see that galabingo.co.uk is on 12th position at http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=bingo&btnG=Sea... where your tools shows 26th.

Kind regrads,
Marcin K.

Hi Aaron,

Like MarcinK I'd also like to report massive discrepancies in the rank that rank checker reports in Google UK & the rank it actually is.

For example, aberrooftruss.co.uk is 6th in this search:-

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=roof+truss&btnG=Google+Search&meta

However on Rank Checker it's being shown as not within the top 200 spots.

This is on the 1.6.4. version, and I'm not logged in to any google account.

Hey Aaron,

It would be cool if there was a toggle for "Pages from..." when querying local engines. E.g. append "&meta=cr%3DcountryAU" to google.com.au for "Pages from Australia". Being able to check both local results and web results for the same engine at the same time would be the icing on the cake.

Cheers,
Joe

Yes, that did bring it all back, thanks Marcin K.

Hi Aaron,
Love this tool. Am having a problem, though. It's not letting me save any new presets. Just updated to the latest version. Any ideas?

Thanks!
Erin

Hi great tool , been using it for as long as i can remember, great resource when you have quite alot of sites.

Something i would like to see is maybe a "difference" tab.

I.e a +/- In green and red saying how many positions the site has dropped or risen since it was last checked by Rank Checker ?

I know its only a gimmick but in all honesty i have a couple maybe 5 what i class as my flagship sites, the rest i like to browse the rankings to see how the are doing and i dont save any CSV files for the smaller sites.

I just think it would be a good little feature.

let me know what you think

We might add a feature like that sometime. It surely would be useful

Hi Aaron,

i was wondering, when you are checking your site to see how it ranks for a keyword, does rank checker search the entire site including the subpages? or is it just checking the tld for the keyword?

reason i ask is i was trying to use it to check to see if one of my subpages was ranking for a keyword, but it doesn't all fit, i run out of characters and i can't put in the full url.

you can just enter the root URL and it will detect sub-pages

Look at the search results and do a bit of research. Your answers are right in front of your eyes.

Aaron

When exporting one set of results to CSV, the result 'columns' show zeros, and the URL columns are blank.

Here's how every line appears in the exported file:
"keyword",0,"",0,"",0,""

The most recent results appear correctly when opening the preset in Rank Checker.

Exporting a preset's history to CSV also works correctly.

Optimizing and emptying the database, and reinstalling the plugin have had no effect on the corrupted CSV output.

Deleting the database manually is the only way I've managed to restore the export function, but history is lost, and after a few runs the error turns up again.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this? Excepting this one problem, Rank Checker's the best free tool I've found to monitor keyword ranking. Keep up the good work!

Alex

Unfortunately I do not know what is causing that Alex. you do have the most recent version installed, right?

Hi Aaron
I have using rank checker tool from very first time - I must say it's an excellent work for us from your end but there are some problem in google checking in this tool, when I try to check rank it shows wrong result
like - if I search "brochure design" for the site > webguru-india.com/brochure-design.php manually shows in first page but when I checking in rank checker tool it shows in position 189.

Please see the matter and grab the bug ....
Thanks:)
Deb

Hi Aaron

Many thanks for the great tool. I too have the same problem as "debseo" above - I can manually check in Google (both .com and .co.uk) and find a first page listing, but the tool shows it on page 10. It is only a few select phrases that it seems to struggle with. Any ideas? I have FF3 with latest versions of the tool.

I'd also love to see the addition that Riverwire suggested:

> +/- In green and red saying how many positions the site has dropped or risen since it was last checked by Rank Checker ?

That would be very helpful!

Thanks again
Trev

I currently use the SEO Rank Checker plug-in for Firefox. Great tool.

Do you have the ability to check for multiple positions for a domain? E.g. In addition to seeing the top rank position for www.company.com, can I view all positions that this domain ranks (in the top 200)?

A related question is can I check multiple related company domains in a single search? www.company.com; us.company.com; uk.company.com; home.company.com

Thx,
Brent Harrison
(@smokejumper)

We show any page from a site that ranks from a site if you enter site.com as the URL, but we do not show the second ranking page. For that I would recommend buying Advanced Web Ranking. It is a quite affordable tool, and they do not upsell you with junk via hyped up emails (which is a big part of the reason I don't recommend most SEO software providers).

Hi there!
A new odd development - I am now unable to save presets. I add the keyword list in like normal, then click "save," it asks me for the title and I enter one, click OK. Then when I go to the Open button, there are still no presets listed there.

Originally I thought this was my fault somehow because I changed computers again and was trying to use my old rankchecker.sqlite file. However, I've tried downloading Rankchecker to a completely fresh computer that has never used it before and saving presets on it, and that computer is running into the same problem.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

could you upload your sqlite file to a server and then give us a link to that location?

i have just run a list of keywords to check google.co.uk, google.com, yahoo uk and msn ranking.

i haven't logged in to google for 3 days and i have never searched for the keywords i am looking at.

hence when i double-checked, firefox rank chaker's ranking had nothing to do with the results i get by searching on google, yahoo etc.

rank chacker sometimes rates a keyword as 113rd on google.co.uk while it is actually 4th.
or vice-versa: shows it is 3rd or 5th while actually it is 75th (just one example from the lot).

95% of rank checkers results had nothing to do with the actual rank i get when i search in these search engines.

could you please advise?

can you recommend another tool to use?

Thanks, Aaron.
I think the problem must be that my old SQLITE file is corrupted. Once I deleted it and let rankchecker make a new one I was able to save new presets.

I've uploaded the old one. Can you confirm that this is no longer usable?
http://control.cisdata.net/bin/filelink.php/AR103070/1f579c6e1b8445d8549...

as long as you got it working now we probably won't troubleshoot the old one, but if you wanted to troubleshoot the old one, what you could do is

right click on rank checker logo ... left click on options ... and then there are 2 options buttons there to optimize database or empty database

thank you very much for your help.

I tried the optimize database button but nothing seemed to happen. Is there supposed to be a noticeable result, or is it all behind the scenes?

I know you are really busy, but would you mind looking at the old file quickly for me? If I can't get it working that's over a year of historical ranking info down the drain.

we would probably have to charge for that type of service. :(

you could probably hire someone off of elance or rentacoder to look at it as well.

LOL. OK, makes sense. I just had to give begging a try! =)
Thanks again.

Hmm, this is weird. I have installed rankchecker on a another computer in the past (probably 6 months ago) with no problem.

Now, on my new PC, I can't get it to show up in FireFox. ie. there is no RankChecker button at the bottom of the screen, and no menu item under Tools.

I have un-installed and re-installed rankchecker a couple of times, restarted FireFox many times, even checked to see if FF is updated.

Is anybody having similar problems?

RankChecker version 1.6.7
FireFox version 3.0.10

I keep getting hyphens for Google just for one domain - I set it to 5 seconds between checks - been like this for 2 days - why would it just do this for ONE WEBSITE???

Any suggestions - otherwise I LOVE THIS TOOL!

Have you updated to the most recent version biztips? When did this issue happen?

Carlross - I had a similar problem when I was trying to use my old rankchecker sqlite file that was corrupted. I would install the addon and it would show up, then for no reason it'd disappear from the menu and browser window. Are you trying to use an old sqlite file?

I have had a problem with the start button being greyed out.
I tried uninstall and the reinstall, as well as restarting my computer. Any ideas on why this is not working?
Thanks in advance.

Hi There - Am i missing something? I just cant see how I down load the rank checker! How do i do this?
Thanks in advance...
Chas

Thanks Aaron, that cleared up the problem.
Great Tool!!

Guys, I downloaded the rank checker tool today but cannot get it to work.

When I add a domain and keyword to check and hit start nothing seems to happen. The gray circle on the right side is rotating but no results ever show.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

under the options menu click "empty database" and see if that fixes the issue.

Will this be updated to check bing as well?

It is still pulling results from Microsoft's search right now. We will update the label from "Live" to "Bing" soon.

Hey Aaron, thanks for this great tool. Is there any plan to increase the # of scheduled tasks that can be run in the future? I can only seem to get 10 presets on the scheduled task list.

Also, how do you delete a preset from the scheduled task list?

Thanks again for all the time invested...

Currently we do not have any short term upgrade plans. But we might make some down the road.

If you open up your preset list I think there is a red x next to item which you can click to delete it.

I'd like to sync Rankchecker on my desktop and laptop. Where are the data files so I can copy those instead of entering all keywords again?

the Rank Checker sqlite file can be found at

c: / documents and settings / my username / application data / mozilla / firefox / profiles / someweirdstring / rankchecker.sqlite

Application data is typically a hidden folder, and someweirdstring is a random string like br6qcmz3.default

Hi Aron,

Nice tool, I have a suggestion to make though, I think it would be very useful for a user who needs to check a high amount of domains to import the domain and key words for each domain from a txt file.

What do you think ?

You can import a keyword list all at once for 1 domain name. It does not have txt file import...but you can upload a list of dozens of keywords for a domain name and save it as a preset list in say 15 seconds.

Hey there,

I've been looking for a reliable rank checker for quite some time, even thought of writing one myself. But now when I found Rank Checker, life has just became easier :-).

Couple notes...

1. Would be nice to be able to position the Rank Checker icon somewhere else in the browser.

2. Also would be great to be able to edit presets.

3. Finally, when exporting a .csv with Hebrew characters, it shows pretty messed up in Excel. Notepad gets it but it looks bad.

Hope to see some upgrades soon.

Rankchecker was working fine until recently. Today, it has just started hanging on me. I feed 100 queries in it...It works for sometime and then hangs... to resolve the problem, I upgraded it to latest version, restarted firefox, restarted the machine, but nothing helped. will greatly appreciate any input or help on how to resolve this.

Regards

1.) right click on logo
2.) click on "options" to open options panel
3.) try "Optimize database"...

4.) if #3 does not not work you may need to "Empty database" (though doing that would purge your old data)

If you are a paying customer I can get your feedback and put you in contact with our programmer.

Another solid and affordable option on the rank checking front is Advanced Web Ranking.

Hi,

I downloaded the rank checker today for the first time and I cant add any keywords either singular or multiple, what's going on?

If you right click into the options panel there are options to optimize database or empty the database. You might want to try those. If those do not work then you might need to uninstall and reinstall it.

This question was already asked by user "adamulivi". I searched for an answer but couldn't find one.

Why can't I enter a 2-character keyword in Rank Checker?

I need to check for a 2-character keyword which happens to be about the most important one in the market I need to check for.

Is there a way to adjust this?

currently we do 3 letters and up. there are very few legitimate keywords worth tracking that are only 2 letters...so we didn't design it to do that.

Where can I find the Rank Checker sqlite file under Windows 7? I have no luck searching for rankchecker.sqlite

Also, is it possible on the Open Preset dialog window to list the sites Alphabetically instead of chronologically?

Since I don't have a Windows 7 computer I am unsure of the file location there. But since Windows 7 was just mostly a dressing up / front end re-write of Vista the location should be similar to that of the Vista file. Note that the application data folder may be a hidden folder by default (I think it is in Vista).

Hi Aaron,

I'm having a similar issue with Bing, as of last week. I'm getting data from Google and Yahoo but getting all "dashes" for Bing (I did check these against manual searches and our site comes up just fine). Any helps is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

have you been using a query delay? do you have the most recent version installed?

Hey Aaron,
Great tool!! I'm having problems with Bing as well. What's the latest version of the tool? I'm using 1.6.8.

I have the query delay set for 5.

Thanks!!

1.) can you list a keyword and domain it is not working for?
2.) in the options panel have you tried repairing the database and/or flushing it (please note that flushing the database will clear the old data...so if that is important to you I wouldn't be in a rush to do that)?
3.) are you logged into a Live/Bing account? perhaps logging out, clearing cookies, and re-starting Firefox could help.

Hi Aaron,

I've tried the above steps. Here is an example:
Keyphrase: Pulmonologist in Denver Co
Domain: healthgrades.com

I just did a manual search and we came up as #3.

Many thanks!

yeah I get a result for that...did you try the above 1 2 3 tips?

ahha...glad it got fixed :)

Hi Aaron,

I am having the same exact problem with Bing that sfree9892 described. I went through the three steps and everything, but still no success. I didn't understand what sfree9892 did to resolve the problem. Could you elaborate please? Others in my office are having the same problem.

he stated his issue was the browser blocking third party cookies...sounds like maybe a security setting + being logged into Microsoft created the issue?

It seems as though on Yahoo! PPC ads are being counted as rankings. So if I am in the #1 paid spot, and 10 organically it shows me as #1 in the reports.

I do not think this is super important, but worth putting in the bug reports for the next version.

Added Werty :)

Hiya,

If I haven't said this before, then I'm sorry.. Rank Checker is absolutely great, its the only SERP checker I've been using since I started doing SEO about 2 months ago.

However, I've been having the same problem dkbarrington and sfree9892 were having with the Bing account for the past one week. I'm not too sure what sfree9892 did as well so I would like to know what the solution to the problem is. Cos it keeps saying I'm not listed on bing but when I check it myself, I fine myself in the first 2 pages.

Cheers!

I'm having the same problems as several others on these two threads. I enter the domain and keyword but the Start and the Save buttons are grayed out, and the Add button does nothing.
I've reinstalled it, at no avail. Is anyone who had this particular problem managed to solve it?

I have just got "We are sorry" page from google.lt for using this software (used it before with no problems) What a hell?!

It is not because you used the software. It is because you used the software without reading the instructions. Big difference.

This extension has courtesy settings which allow you to ping search engines for data at a slow rate. You probably want to set the delay to at least 2 or more seconds. If you set it at 0 do not be surprised if some of the engines at least temporarily block you for scraping data.

You can be unhappy about your ignorance and your lack of ability to follow directions. But what does that solve? It doesn't cure the ignorance.

It would be super cool to be able to edit the keywords entered into existing profiles. For example, tragically misspelled words that hose the data could be removed.

It would be a great feature to count the position in actual search rankings while not counting ads placed above your url.

Really - this is the best resource I have found for SEOing my client's site.

I wonder, is there any available info that talks about using RC for local search? Because, of course, when someone here in Seattle just types in "best plumber", Google automatically calls up the map & listings for local plumbers. I have been adding geo-tags to my client's KWs & RC-ing that way, but of course it is hand to figure out the results for local searches without the geo-tags.

Also, when are you going to offer a pay version that does more than just 100 at a time? With the geo-tags, I typically have 1500-1800 KWs and it takes hours to run! Would be a great money-making idea for you!

Lastly, there are problems, I notice, with duplicate KWs, with KWs that have capitals in the middle, and other KWs RC just seems to dislike! Might be helpful to put a list of those bugs somewhere so folks can work around them.

Thanks again MUCH for such a great (& free!) tool!

Hi Carl
1.) currently it works on maps.google.com, but we have not yet added functionality for the google local 7 pack on the regular search results

2.) yes we will increase the limits when there is a paid version available, though when we launch the paid version there might be many upgrades made at once...so it could be about a month or so before public launch of that.

3.) so there were issues with keyword duplication, capital vs lower case, and what else? can you give examples?

thanks for the feedback
cheers
a

I download the tool and was surprised to find it won't work the latest version of firefox. Please advise when an updated version will be posted.

Hi Aaron,

your tool is great.

1 question and 1 suggestion:

When i export my data to cvs to open it in Site Rank Reporter i must convert the data to ANSI to see the right german keywords. I think this bug is from Site Rank Reporter?

Can you do an option to set the default look up of 200 positions to track only the first twenty rseults per page for example. In some cases i want tracking only the first ten, so i can do a report for my clients with the exact google position, when they look at goggle with default settings. Because they do not understand, that my 5 position reporting by looking up 200 results per page, corresponds position 3 by looking up 10 results per page.

You can do a checkbox "Overwrite default lookup (200)": []. Then enable an input field, for setting a number and validating that this number is not greater then your default seetings.

Greetings,

Seo Networker
SEO Webdesign Hamburg
http://www.x-webdesign.de

We might add more features like that going forward...but we are sorta stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of offering lots of options while having it freely accessible. More options = more time spent supporting it. Once we have a paid version then we will likely add some more features.

Hi,

Do you have to have your computer turned on/firefox open to run scheduled tasks?

Thanks!

Hello,
Is there any way to filter out sponsored search results from the rankings? I have several keywords that are not ranking organically, but their ppc sponsored result will show up at the top. Does the tool return rankings of the keyword as if it were searched for in quotes, or without quotes? I am also getting a dash mark for Google sometimes on words I know are ranking well. Is the rank checker compatible with the latest version of FF? FYI I have personal results switched off in RC and I reset my browser each time I check a kw rank.
Thanks
Lara

Hi Lara
we don't have any tutorials for how to get it to work with the site rank reporter and such. We plan on offering more features soon...but it is taking a while to get it all coded up.

If you need graphs soon (and value your time) AdvancedWebRanking is a solid product with graphs built in.

my start button has disappeared !
I have re installe the program, but no start button !

cannot run my data files.

any ideas

Thanks

Ken

You might need to look at the options panel and click the optimize database button. If that doesn't work then clear out your old data via the empty database button and it should restart.

What options panel? All I see are Save, Open, Clear, Add, Add Multiple Keywords, Start and Export results to CSV besides the two input boxes. This is the just-downloaded version.

Also, the program seems to be slowing to a crawl. It had crashed the computer before and I have reinstalled it. Anyone else report this?

You are the first person to claim that the plugin is slow, as it is nothing but a lightweight browser extension.

In terms of how to see the options panel...right click on the logo in the lower right corner of your web browser.

Hello Aaron,

BTW thx for this AWESOME tool.

I've did a rank check today for the keyword "last minute deal" on "google.ca unpersonnalized"...

rank check tells me that my site (http://www.aircanadavacations.com) ranks #12...

...when i do a manual check (using Yoast's unpersonnalized search for Google.ca), i am #8.

I had bad results for most of my keywords...

IBP gave me the good ranking results but i don't want to use IBP because it sucks so bad!

i'm i missing anything here ?

If you read the about page / official download page for rank checker it explains why there are some rank variations like that.

I hadn't used the Rank Checker tool in a few months, and when I tried it this morning, it was extremely slow and actually crashed my browser. When I reloaded and tried again, I also brought up the Task Manager and noticed that any time it was running, my CPU usage would spike between 40% - 100%, never going below 40%. As soon as Rank Checker was closed, CPU usage went back to 5% - 15%.

I'm using Firefox 3.6.2 (Windows XP machine), and according to the add-on manager, my version of Rank Checker is up to date. Any ideas?

Try buying more RAM and/or using fewer tabs in Firefox and/or optimizing the Rank Checker database.

Aaron,

I'm having the same problem with Rank Checker causing my machine to go very slow and causing CPU spikes.

I've used Rank Checker for ages now and it's never been a problem until one of the last updates.

It seems that I can use Firefox fine, then I'll launch Rank Checker using the icon and try to add multiple keywords and then the PC generally runs at snails pace - making it unusable.

What do you think?

If you are a subscriber and ask your question in the member forums we can help troubleshoot it...but outside of that I can't really afford to provide free support once the product is already being given away.

I downloaded the Rank Checker Tool because I really need a Tool that shows me the Rankings for various Keywords on google.co.za. First everything looked great but the Problem is, that google.com and google.co.za are showing hyphens. I tried it with Keywords that are def. Ranked 1 and also with different Sites. All the same. I just get the yahoo Rank. I saw that there were Problems, but sadly I can not see anything how these where solved.

If its of any interest: I am using Mac and the Firefox Version 3.6.3

I hope there is an answer out there as I am really looking forward using this tool.

Thanks, Ksanna

We just updated this today to accommodate for search result changes.
http://www.seobook.com/update-rank-checker

I've been using Rank Checker for some time now. It's a great tool! Thanks for that!

Since monday the tool stopped showing positions, it states that my websites are nowhere in the results with a " - ". When I check it manually I see they still have top positions.

Tried it on several pc's and from different locations, all showing the same results in the tool.

I have an app on my iPhone that checks organic positions, this also stopped working since monday.

What could be the cause? Did Google change something to block rank checking tools? Maybe I used the tool to much?

If you read the most recent post on our blog you will see that we just updated it :D

So you need to update the extension

This plugin on FF started crashing my computer when I try to use the "Add multiple keywords" tool. I thought it was just me, but it happens on a co-worker's computer as well. It's too bad because it makes a great plugin virtually unusable.

This might have began happening after the last update, probably been about a month since it's been acting this way for me.

Thanks,

David

I don't want to do it again, but it completely crashes my computer to the point where I get the blue hardware failure screen btw.

After the recent update to google I'm not able to check google.co.uk from one particular computer. I updated rank checker and even reinstalled with no luck, google.com and other locals work just fine and co.uk also works on others comps. What to do?

I noticed on two computers after I updated them today with latest version they both get hung up at Bing on the first keyword.

Hello,

Yeah that is the same with me, the rank report works fine without BING, but with BING it freezes and won't go past the first few words.

Just to reiterate the problems being experienced of late in the rank reports. For my part, according to the reports, my keyword rank has fallen off the charts with many keywords reporting hyphen (nil result) counts, when in fact the keywords render prominent positions in real time, not withstanding personalised search results.
I think the issue sits principally with the local search result extensions, particularly .ie in my case. Likewise, the software seems to be indexing sub-level URLs that are not appearing in the actual search results, and in fact are not live URLs at all, such as 'target=_blank....
Also, though separate software, there may be a relation between these glitches and an error encountered in the site rank reporter upload facility, where upon exporting a history to csv, site rank reporter is unable to read the file and returns a message: str is undefined.
These road-blocks are recent, as until now, I have been a very happy chappy with SEObook rank extension, so thank you for sharing it with the firefox community.

This tool worked exceptionally well until the last "update". Now when I export data to CSV it arrives with all sorts of random strings in the excel file, making it impossible to actually utilize the findings. Any idea what could be causing this? I've deleted and reinstalled multiple times.

So is there a workaround for this tool not working? Is it caused by google, the most recent update to firefox or, well anything? I really can't find a tool as good as this for monthly statistcis, so it would be nice if i knew wether I should just abandon it or wait...

We should have another update in 1 to 2 weeks. It still works on literally 100,000+ computers ... but it is hard for us to do FREE remote troubleshooting when my time is super expensive.

If you can get it to work awesome. If you can't get it to work for you and value your time and/or my time & want another option to play with then AdvancedWebRanking is a great option. It is paid, but its cheap.

My Rank Checker (downloaded on 3 June) lets me call up Google and Yahoo by control-clicking the rank numbers, but it doesn't work for Bing.

We should have a new version in the next week or 2 :D

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the great tool, it's a gem, and it works extremely well for me. You know I'm a big fan of everything you do here on SEO Book, and this tool is no exception.

I appreciate that your time is extremely valuable, and I'm not quite a paying member yet, so I understand if responding to the following suggestion sits outside of the scope of your available resources. To give some context, here's a run down of the situation:

* I use Rank Checker from Australia to check for rankings across Google.com, Google.com.au, Yahoo (Australia), and Bing.
* Users in Australia search through both Google.com.au and Google.com (the search fields in Firefox or Safari etc often automatically default to Google.com).
* The search results from Google.com in Australia are significantly different to the search results from Google.com.au
* When a user searches in Google.com from Australia Google doesn't insert an ISO two-letter country code into the search string
* When Rank Checker runs it inserts the "gl=us" country code into the search string for the Google.com version, i.e. http://www.google.com/search?q=widget&gl=us&num=100&pws=0
* The search results in Google.com from Australia for any given term vary considerably dependent on whether "gl=us" is included/removed; on site's I've tested it's the difference between being near invisible on the "gl-us" version, and having a strong presence on the non-"gl-us" version.
* Replacing "gl=us" with "gl=au" does not produce the 'normal' results in Google.com, but rather seems to generate SERPs as if the search had been conducted from Google.com.au (I'm assuming Google.com is using ip targeting or similar as standard for Google.com instead).

Given that a large proportion of Aussies search via Google.com, I'm thinking it would be great if the was a way to configure Rank Checker so that it can perform three types of Google queries:
1.) Checks Google.com from the "gl-us" version (as per current design)
2.) Checks Google.com without inserting "gl=us" into the search string, as this would generate ranking results that mirror those of a Google.com user in Australia.
3.) Checks Google.com.au (as per current design)

Obviously this is equally applicable to other countries.

I think this would be a great addition because I know that there's a large proportion of Australian searches that go through Google.com, and I hazard a guess that this would be the case for other locations too.

Thanks once more for the terrific tool.

Cheers,

Evan

When you go to Google.com doesn't it redirect you to Google.com.au?

lately (the past week or so?) when I check my ranking, the URL list for google (google only, it's fine for google UK, yahoo, and bing) returns my domain name with a weird string of code after it like this:

"domain.com/class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt(this"
plus more after that...

I checked my code on the page and it's fine, W3C validated and Google webmaster tool did not have any issues reported...

So I'm thinking it's the plugin itself that's having issues?

Please help.

This tool does not work in my Firefox 3.6.6 browser.

The start button does not light up, but stays grayed out after adding domain and keywords.

Can't use it.

Hey Aaron, Any update on the new version? Thanks in advance

Also getting the weird string:
"domain.com/class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt(this"
when checking google.

Just installed on a fresh machine. Same thing.

This makes exports unusable. Please update :)

I am having the same weird return string only from Google....when can we expect a resolution? Thanks

Hi,

Google is not working on the latest SEO Book toolbar. It is only showing hyphons when in reality the website pages are ranking on the first page in google.

I didn't have this issue before. Has anyone found a way to resolve this issue?

Thank you
MC

Has anyone figured out a fix for Google? Yahoo & Bing still work. I am using newest version of Firefox.

Hi Aaron,

I'm having trouble getting RankChecker to run a report on domains that have folders. I've updated the RankChecker tool (twice), updated FF. I've optimized my database but I haven't cleared it as I don't want to lose my data.

What I've tested:

www.domain.com keyword (will work)
domain.com keyword (will work)
http://www.domai.com keywords (will work)
domain.com/folder (does not work)
www.domain.com/folder (does not work)
www.domain.com/folder/ (does not work)
http://www.domain.com/folder/ (does not work)

I've isolated that the problem is not because I've left on or removed the http://, the www, or have used or not used a terminating "slash" after a foldername.

I do see that the tool will pull in subfolders if I specify a top level domain (ie, www.sitename.com).

However, I work on a rather large site - we have thousands of pages where similar keywords exist and I've love to be able to determine which of our pages is ranked highest for a particular keyword. Some of these domains have 4 or 5 folder extensions in them
(ie, domain.com/1/2/3/4/5/index.html).

I suspect that RankChecker isn't the tool of choice for me - or is it? Can you please let me know if there is a way to tweak Rank Checker to work for my evil purposes? Or are there other tools you could point me at?

Thanks again for your expertise.

Kind regards,
Linda

Hi Linda
you might want to check out some other services like Advanced Web Ranking.

We're trying to run scheduled tasks to load rank checker. I'm having some trouble seeing what's actually happening though. Our scheduled task to launch firefox runs ok, and it seems like the scheduled task to launch rankchecker runs ok, but it just hangs (so far for like 30 minutes). I've tested it before and sometimes it takes hours before I close it out. If I manually run it, I can export the data with no problems, but we really want this to be an automated task because we'll be running it at several locations. Has anybody experienced problems similar to this before?

I let Rank Checker run over night and here's the firefox crash report:

Add-ons: {20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}:1.2.1,rankchecker@seobook.com:1.7.2,srr@tccommerce.com:1.0,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:3.6.8
BuildID: 20100722155716
CrashTime: 1280290201
EMCheckCompatibility: true
FramePoisonBase: 00000000f0de0000
FramePoisonSize: 65536
InstallTime: 1280178206
ProductName: Firefox
ReleaseChannel: release
SecondsSinceLastCrash: 7201
StartupTime: 1280286600
Theme: classic/1.0
Throttleable: 1
URL: http://www.google.com/
Vendor: Mozilla
Version: 3.6.8

This report also contains technical information about the state of the application when it crashed.

On the Rank Checker plugin for firefox, the results for Google.com are returning a very strange URL. However Yahoo/Bing results just display my normal URL.

I checked other sites than mine for Google results and the URL is fine for them.

Here is what it returns:

#################

www.mysite.com" class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','30','AFQjCNFv10gZDkxui5uZI63nVmPf47PAzA','CE7X-zIvaqm48jYEG8syTg','0CMYBEBYwHQ')">Title & keyword tags for my website are listed here, more keywords listed, another listed keyword ... - 9 visits - Jul 27<./span><./span><.div class="s">Meta description listed here <.em>Meta description listed here<./em> Meta description listed here <.em>Meta description listed here, Meta description listed here<.em>Meta description listed here<./em> Meta description listed here.
<.cite> www.mysite.com/<./cite> - <.span class=gl><.a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:REMOVED:www.mysite.com/+keyword_listed_here&cd=30&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" onmousedown=.".return rwt(.this,'','','','30','AFQjCNFd6GM6W1Ucvr9HHWhBuCKO_bLNHA','u6D5L1j1K_NW2f-wTvGx1w','0CMgBECAwHQ')"Cached<./a> - <.a href.="./search?hl=en&safe=off&gl=US&pws=0&q=related:www.mysite.com/+keyword+listed-here&tbo=1&sa=X&ei=_1JWTKG0J4LhnAelmMyQBA&ved=0CMkBEB8wHQ".>Similar<./a><./span><./.span><./div>

<.li class="g w0">
<.a href="http://www.red holl.com/.

#################

The last URL is redholl.com is not my site, but in the same industry. That URL is not listed on my site anywhere or in any of my code. I've went through my code and couldn't find any scripts or lines that weren't closed properly, and the code is passing as Valid XHTML 1.0 transitional by W3C. My rankings don't seem to be affected, but I am wondering if this is a bug with Rank Checker, or an issue with my site, or with google? Again, the URL is just displaying my normal URL on yahoo/bing, but google displays the above.

(I added in a bunch of periods to break the code since it seemed to be formatting in the comment and removed/modified other sensitive information)

Yesterday, I upgraded to v1.7.4. Unfortunately, Google still presents results that have very strange URLs. These can't be exported to csv and be easily used (making exports worthless).

Will this be fixed?

Thanks for the upgrade to rank checker Aaron - Legend!

I am getting the same problems with weird URLs for Google as the comment above. Using 1.7.4. Any fix for this?

RC: 1.7.4
FF: 3.6.8

The Rank Checker is grabing and displaying, some code, site description, and some other data where we the simple URL should be.

The real problem is that when you export to csv is really hard to get the file fixed.

If the developer could at least disable the URL display will be great to continue using this wanderful tool.

Thanks,
Hugo
sitioi.com

Hey,

Loving Rank Checker!

Any plans for an iPhone version?

That would be sweet!

Thanks,

Paul

No plans for that at this point in time.

Im having the same problem reported in the posts listed above about the Google URL being useless info. When I run Rank Checker the Google URL reports as "class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt....." Is there a fix for this.

Same Problem as hugoaf. Below is a line of code that came from my CSV export of rank tracker:

"http://yourdomain.com","onh therapy",3,"yourdomain.com/" class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','3','AFQjCNHFoDj2Di82CZmV_ncGwhUMbTIzng','yk1hxrI5AdGHtIzYrsqZeA','0CCQQFjAC')">ONH/SOD Stem Cell Treatment

 - Aug 19
blah blah ...
yourdomainonh.com/ - Cached

Hi,

After having troubles with the google.nl domain earlier, currently the google.com domein doesn't give results either. I have no clue why this is happening, but the tool has become useless.

Remark: the only correct result given is for keywords for which a domain is ranked no. 1.

Rank checker shows 2nd, 4th, 5th, 12th, 45th on my top 5 keywords but a physical search on yahoo doesn't find anything even close not even within top 100.

not sure why I have latest ver FF and RChecker

example:
searching for
patriotsteelbuildings.us
brings up #1 in RankChr but looking at yahoo its not showing up on the first 5 pages.

We use the Yahoo! API still. Currently where their results are powered by Bing you can just look at the Bing column, however in many foreign markets they are not yet powered by Bing. I expect the APIs to catch up with the results in the next month or 2.

Hi Aaron, Please suggest me a tool for checking ranking. I currently have 200-300 keywords and the competitor is different for all the keywords.

I really like your tool, the feature I like most is we can insert keywords with targeted domain, it's awesome but there is limit that we can enter only 100 keywords at a time. Please suggest me any good tool to generate the ranking report. please note that I have different competitors (2 competitors)for each keyword. Thanks in advance

Advanced Web Ranking

Hey Aaron,

I use RankChecker pretty religiously, and want to start by saying how grateful I am for you providing such a useful (and free) tool.

I'm noticing a strange bug/issue today that I haven't seen before... When I generate a report, any keywords that I am tracking with rankings on page 1 or higher for Google show up fine. However, any keyword positions that are at 11 or higher in Google are showing up as "-" or not in the top 200.

At first I was in a panic thinking that a major algorithm change had just crushed my rankings for several different sites, but after manually checking, the rankings on page 2,3,4, etc are all still there where they were a few days ago. Has anyone else reported this issue? Should I possibly just try uninstalling and then re-installing the extension?

Thanks in advance! - Andrew

Google just made their largest interface change in years today. It takes time to update the software code to make up for the changes.

I'm having the same problem reported above about the Google URL being useless. The Google URL reports as "class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt....." that runs over several lines.

This means that csv exports are completely screwed because the URL is written across several cells, thus overwriting the results from Yahoo etc. Is there a fix for this? or any way of disabling the URL display? Have you seen this problem or know why this is happening?

...is not to be logged into Google Accounts when you use it.

HI,

First Thank You very much as I'm sure your aware this tool and all the others are really good so Thank you very much for them.

when I csv export the results from Rank checker and open the file in excel all the data is messed up with a lot of html in there any idea on what this may be?

Similar to comments above, the above string appears in the Google URL for some, not all, of my searches.

There also seem to be spam websites at the end of the code. helpmycreditscore DOT com and mortgage101 DOT com and virginiamortgagedepo DOT com. Where are these coming from?

If this is how Google is viewing my site, then we have major issues (hacked? , but it sounds like there are problems with the tool, not my site?

I could really use some advice on whether this is our site or the Rank Checker. Thanks Aaron.

Great tool, but the export is all messed up on Google Sites?

Hi all,

How's everyone?, I have a questions regarding on adding a domain in "Rank Checker", I have a site, focusing on per keyword articles, below are some of keyword under this site:

Main site:
esolarpowercost.com

Keywords:
wind powered generator:
keyword URL: http://www.esolarpowercost.com/articles/what-everybody-ought-to-know-abo..."

that's the keyword url that I want to add on rank checker, I just want to know the rank of that keyword that I mention above every time I click the "Add" button the domain keyword still on the box and it didn't display on the box below, do the "Domain:" box only accepting the "esolarpowercost.com" without slashes? when I tried to remove the slashes after the ".com" til the last of title, I didn't encountered any errors it will automatically added on the box output display.
Is there anyone here knows on how to fix this issues? do the Domain box only accepting a domain url without slashes?, if I added the slashes like ".com/articles/title" it will not added on the box display below?.

Thanks for the help guys.

Best

Nhile

Hi all,

Fantastic tool, use it weekly for my reports.

How do I backup my presets so I can move them to a different pc? Is it a matter of copying rankchecker.sqlite and moving to the C:\Documents and Settings\marketing\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k38ltok0.default folder.

Many thanks

I think that is right :)

I read through all the comments and did not find anyone else having this problem? When I add the site and keywords then press the add button nothing happens. Even when I try submitting each keyword one at a time, still nothing. I want to use this tool so bad, but when I press add it does nothing. I watched the video and I am doing everything to the T, but it will not work. I even uninstalled then reinstalled it, still nothing. Why can't I get the keywords and site to add?

Hi there, am getting the same "hyphen" issue as many others, rankchecker worked the first few times and then began returning hyphens. Works infrequently for non Google sites and VERY rarely for google. Any suggestions? I can't find any other tool that is any use or returns rankings higher than 100 would love to get rankchecker working again. Have re-installed too.

I tried clearning and optimizing. The clearing was no big deal because I haven't been able to add anything. Still when I add the tags and the domain, it does nothing when I click add. Man, I really want to use this, but it just won't work.

Hello there,
After using a few paid for SEO tools I was excited to find Rank Checker for free.
Only problem is, I'm having problems with the results that are displayed. Rankings (particularly for google.co.uk) are inaccurate and I can't rely on them. We already rank highly for a lot of search terms so positions are mostly only out by one or two positions but this doesn't really help me. Do you have a solution please?
Sarah

Hi Sarah
Our tool aims to be directionally accurate, but if we pull in 10 results at a time (rather than 100) then I get to eat a bunch of hate mail from people about Google blocking them for scraping search results and such.

If you want a paid desktop solution you might want to check out Advanced Web Ranking.

Hi!

I'm a quite new user of SEO book's tools and I just love some of the features. The rank checker would be super - if it would only work with Swedish letters.

The two most important keywords for "us" both contain the Swedish letter "ä" (ae, ä). For one, rank checker seems to show correct result at least for google.se (which is most important), but for the other (that's my main income source right now :) ) it shows "us" being on 18th place, while we're really at place 13.

Known bug? Any chance of it being fixed?

Otherwise a super tool! Thanks.

/Snah

This just started happening after I upgraded to the latest version of Rank Checker and Firefox. Rank Checker crashes my system when I try to open any preset. Rank Checker is VERY slow getting to the point of opening the preset and crashes when I select the preset. I am running XP Pro Service Pack 3, Firefox 3.6.12, and Rank Checker 1.7.6. I have reinstalled Rank Checker and I have optimized the database.

I've been happily using this tool for a long while now and just ran into my first bump. Seems that Google local results are confusing things with some of our rankings. Workaround isn't too bad...I just set my location in a normal Google search to somewhere sufficiently far away. Results seem to be back on track after that.

Just installed Rank Checker (12/6/2010). Can't get it to work. Put in a domain, put in a key word, start button is grayed out. FF 3.6.12, XP Home.

I have been using this tool for a long time without a hitch however, the last two days it has been stalling on Bing. It acts like bing has blocked the script from excessive scraping... I use it once a day to check client accounts so I am not sure if I have abused Bing or if Bing has changed anything in what it "allows".

Also curious as to why the need for Yahoo still exists now that its results are in fact bing results.

Perhaps in future versions you can allows users to select the search engines they want to query. For those who are only interested in Google results that would make the script run a lot quicker.

Thanks for a great tool!!!

You already can select which search engines you want to pull in results from, by right clicking on the logo and editing the look up settings in the options panel.

For anybody running into this same issue, I discovered that Rank Checker would just freeze on any Google rank it tries to pull if you have the Firefox plugin HTTPS-Everywhere plugin enabled. If you have that plugin, just disable it when you want to run rank checker and you'll be fine.

Hi Aaron,

This a great little tool you have produced and exactly what I was looking for!

I would like to see an 'add new' preset button next to save/open/clear which would be a great addition.

Thanks very much!

Emm.

Oh, and a rename feature for the preset groups please as at the moment if I want to rename I am having to re-save the group then click 'cancel' the overwite which then allows me to save a clone with a new filename.

:)

Hi Aaron,

Thanks very much for Rank Checker. It's very helpful as is the history export feature.

Do you have any info regarding these two situations?

When I "Ctl click" on the rank number, it takes me to my Adwords listing and not the displayed organic listing.

Also, my scheduled task feature reverts back to 7 days and nothing shows up in the "run scheduled task" area.

EDIT-
My Google results differ from when I manually search. I am not logged in to any Google account.
one search says 11 on Rank Checker and 5 manually. Another is 197 on Rank Checker and 120 manually.

EDIT-
I think I fixed it. I turned off personalized search in Google. I thought you needed to be logged in to use personalized search. Turns out not anymore. It puts a cookie on your browser (Chrome, I dont' know about other browsers) and you have to turn it off in the Web History of the Google search page top right.
Thanks for your help Aaron and continued success.

logiclab

RankChecker and the new Firefox 4 Beta do not play nicely together. The upgraded Firefox deleted my RankChecker and will not allow me to reload it.

Any fixes?

Laurie :)

I would suggest not using the Firefox beta & rather using their production level browser.

I see a lot of reference to the inability to export useful CSVs due to HTML code gumming up the works, but nothing regarding possible causes or fixes.

Since it apparently works for some people on some machines, would you mind posting what kinds of machines those are, what version of Firefox, etc.

Would really be nice to export a useful CSV

Otherwise, great plugin - thanks!

Hi Aaron,

I have for several days left my Firefox window open for when the scheduled task is supposed to perform. But it never has. Unless the files are stocked somewhere I don't know about? Could you please shed some light on this?

Best,

Olivia

I too am getting all this all this html code spoiling the whole rank checker. It often includes competitors website addresses and Utube links - what's going on??

I am getting a bit concerned with all this as are many others, but still no fixes. Please let us all know if this is being dealt with or not.

Thanks

Steve

When paying customers ask for feedback in our market forums we get things fixed *really* fast. But when people ask us to look into stuff in the blog comments we may eventually get around to it. Our first priority is running our own business for our paying customers. Once the site is fully launched with everything going smooth THEN we can debate looking into stuff people are complaining about on the blog.

Obviously if we are to run a legitimate business we must prioritize our paying customers over people commenting on the blog.

Hi Aaron,
Thank you for putting out such a great tool for free. I've had inconsistent results between my browser and rank checker for some time now. For example, when I look up tempe real estate, rankchecker tells me tempehomes.com is #9 on yahoo. When I do the search myself, I'm seeing more like 37. Do you know what causes the discrepancy?
Thank you,
Steve

Hi Aaron,

Thank you for your quick response. So I have similar problems with G, but not as glaring. Would that be a result of servers then? I know that results vary throughout the country.

Thanks!

Just noticed that Rank Checker updated, but I'm not seeing some changes - Presets is still 'Presets' and I'm still getting garbage from the Google URL column.

Hi,

when will there be an updated version for FF 4.0?

you may want to install this if you want a status bar at the bottom...but it already works without it under the tools menu and in the SEO toolbar as well

Good Morning Aaron,

How do I delete a project from our account? We run sample ranking reports for potential clients and then no longer need to have them stored in our current projects with our current customers? We want to remove them from that list completely so our project manager knows who our REAL clients are. Would appreciate your feedback. Thank you!

Matt

Hello there, i am having a problem with the rankchecker regarding the "scheduled tasks" feature. I cant seem to get any scheduled task started. There seem to be some people who have the same issue, even some who have posted similiar questions in this thread before, but then the thread went on without any conclusive answer. I tried to run scheduled tasks even on two computers, even with a fresh installation of rank checker, leaving all the default values in place, with a preset containing only two keywords. Still it wouldnt start (I always left firefox running, which is thought to be necessary to make it work).

The fact about the system where I tried the "scheduled task"-run with all the default values are:
country of location: Germany
Win Vista 32bit
firefox 3.6.16
rank checker 1.8.2

thanks for your help, rankchecker is an amazing asset!