Like
so many other search engine
optimization agents, we,
too, have found all ranking
checkers we tested, including
the market leaders, to be
highly inaccurate at times,
though not consistently
so, which of course only
makes matters worse. And
which is why we finally
resorted to writing our
own server based, customized
solution.
However,
when determining a web site's
search engine ranking, there's
another fairly important
issue to consider as well:
search engine index flux.
Take Google as an example:
depending on whether you
check rankings on "google.com",
"www.google.com",
"www2.google.com"
and "www3.google.com"
*and* depending on which
phase in their ongoing reindexing
run you
happen to hit, results may
differ dramatically. (This
applies to linkage checks,
too, btw.) There's actually
only a fairly short phase
in any given calendar month
when results on both "google.com"
and "www.google.com"
will be consistent. The
situation is quite similar
with
AltaVista, Inktomi and other
contenders.
Traffic
load, load balancing measures,
indexing runs spread across
hundreds if not thousands
of web servers (Google is
famed to work with 10,000+
Linux boxes!), ongoing ranking
jobs, time of day, etc.
are all factors which may
skew results or make them
fairly unreliable, especially
in a scenario where you
may have to illustrate a
given ranking when presenting
your
services to potential clients.
This
is something SEO clients
should be educated about
very early on in the process
to avoid possible loss of
credibility and confidence.
Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder
and principal of fantomaster.com
GmbH (Belgium), http://fantomaster.com/
, a company specializing
in webmasters software development,
industrial-strength cloaking
and search engine positioning
services. He has been a
web marketer since 1994
and is editor-in-chief of
fantomNews, a free newsletter
focusing on search engine
optimization, available
at: http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html
You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved. Downloaded
at: http://fantomaster.com/
