A website ranking report can mean different things to different organizations and people, but the standard meaning of a "ranking report" is a report produced by an automated application to test where a website ranks in one or more search engines for the keywords and key phrases provided.
Ranking reports are limited in many ways.
- First, the application can report data that is compromised through either the extractions it records from search engine results or sponsorship. Some applications may report information in a manner which would entice the user of that data to buy other of its products.
- Second, it is limited to the search engines selected, and assuming the results are correct, it is further limited by the keywords or phrases used to conduct the ranking test. For example, I saw a recent ranking report listing "madison wisconsin drunk driving attorney" and "drunk driving attorney green bay wisconsin". That site ranked #1 for both search phrases. The problem is that nobody has told end users that they are supposed to search with that phrase, and the majority of website visitors aren't using that search phrase.
- Third, ranking reports may not include paid advertising - often called PPC, for "Pay Per Click". While a person may manage a campaign that runs in the 10's of thousands of dollars, hence placing the website PPC advertisement on numerous results pages, the typical ranking report generator fails to retrieve those ads.
Are ranking reports of any benefit?
Yes, ranking reports can provide a reference point by which to measure variances - but! they are forbidden by Google.
Can ranking reports harm a website's position?
It is not the ranking report per say that can cause harm. Rather, it the means by which ranking reports are created that has the propensity to cause harm.
To create an automated ranking report, an application is configured to query one or more specific search engines and to retrieve the results. Most rank reporting tools provide a means by which the user specifies which search engines to query, the number of concurrent connections to each search engine, and the keywords or phrases to use in the query. When the ranking report request is executed, the application begins rapid consecutive queries against the search engine.
Before sharing Google's notice regarding ranking reports, it may help to understand "what is a search engine?"
The term "search engine", even when used as a noun, has multiple meanings. Given the context here, we will assume we are speaking about "search engines" such as Google, Yahoo & MSN. While each search engine produces unique results, from a thousand foot view, they basically work the same way. Generally speaking, search engine companies write applications called "bots", "robots", or "spiders". People use those terms in sentences such as, "Google's bot came to my website," or "My website was visited by a spider." While the syntax infers that a spider or a bot physically came to your server where your website resides and did something, that isn't exactly how it works. Spiders never leave home. Rather, they are run from the server where they are saved (reside). They make a request for information, usually beginning with a request for a robots.txt file (see Matt Cutts BLOG for info about robot.txt files), crawl through the list of files provided by the directory (or sitemap), and save that information in a repository. Later, the data in that repository is filtered - by algorithms - to produce the data that is then uploaded to the computer databases that then produce the results.
The data produced as results to a query on a search engine may be publicly available but is produced through proprietary methods. From this viewpoint, which is a very simplistic explanation, one could define the results produced to a query as the intellectual property of the search engine, and the databases queried as the property of the search engine.
The queries executed by a ranking report tool are made to the filtered results. Google's position regarding ranking reporting tools, as it is explicitly provided in the webmaster's tools area, is quoted below.
"No Automated Querying
You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things: using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries; "meta-searching" Google; and performing "offline" searches on Google." Directly from "terms of service" http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS
A ranking reporting tool is "software" that "sends queries" "to determine" "ranks" for the various queries.
What if someone else queries for my website ranking? Would that harm my website?
During the configuration process to set up a ranking report request, users are typically provided the options to select which domain names to test, including select pages on that domain. In most instances, the instructions with a ranking report tool direct the user to specify his or her domain name first, and then select other domain names for comparison. When the ranking report is executed, that information can be passed to the search engine. As well, several ranking checks on a particular domain name could also indicate that a site is checking its ranking.
Will it harm your site? That's a question that I will need to defer to Matt Cutts, because I do not know. What I can tell you is that any ranking report requests will originate from a select Internet address, called an IP - Internet Protocol - address. While many people subscribe to services that provide dynamic addressing (such as Time Warner) or proxy addressing (such as AOL did provide), the majority of your online usage can be - at minimum - followed back to your ISP - Internet Service Provider. It can be associated with your domain name is redundant requests are made. And if you have your webmaster tools open, or some other application, such as Adwords open, the correlation between your discrete IP and a ranking report running behind the scenes on your computer is immediately detectable. The Google's of the world may not provide you with information about a visitor's IP, but they have that information.
If you suspect that someone is running ranking reports against your domain name for the purpose of causing you issues, then you may want to utilize traffic monitoring tools that will detect the IP address of anyone coming to your site or making a request for information from the server where your domain is hosted. Google Analytics does not provide that type of information. However, other traffic monitoring applications provide that and more. Later, we'll compare traffic monitoring tools; for now, you may want to refer to ClickZ, searching for website analytics or analytics tools, as there are several articles, but I could not quickly find the comparison research articles. If you suspect problems, you may want to start a log to record incidence.
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