Hi All,

Having spent most of the last 6 years or so working in-house, I have gotten spoiled and used to having a big company behind me to purchase any software / services I want which tbh has made me a bit lazy.

Now I am on the freelance path and have to consider the cost of everything I use, I am looking at building some tools of my own, not just to save money but also to try and get my coding skills back up to speed (another area I have gotten a bit lazy in)

The first thing I am planning on making is a Rank Tracker. Nothing fancy at the moment, just something to run on a scheduled basis via cron job and export the results to a database.

I have some previous experience a few years back using Perl and this is what I am planning to work with, I was just wondering if anyone can recommend any good modules to look at, particularly for Google. Also if anyone can suggest any good open source solutions written in Perl that I can tweak to my own requirements that would good.

Many thanks!

My usual recommendation for anyone working in perl is therapy and sedatives. Perl managed to put me off programming for about 5 years.  Good luck with it though.

Lol, thanks. I know what you mean.

Apparently the syntax puts a lot of people off  although I think that is partly due to what is it's greatest strength, that it is very flexible meaning scripts can be thrown together in a quick and dirty fashion. Also no one likes to look at regex regardless of language...

Why bother going to all the effort of making your own Rank Tracker when you can purchase a ready-made one for a smallish sum?

One I use is Link Assistant's Rank Tracker at:

http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

Unless of course you're a code-masochist :-)

Ed

raventools gives a reasonable chunk of results for a not unreasonable fee.
If you want to pull the ranking data in and do your own thing with it then authority labs looks like an option as well.  I only know about them as they provide the data for raventools, but it's an interesting option.

I am a fan of PERL, but for a project like this I would recommend PHP.

I have also seen several free web-based rank-tracking tools, such as the DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker.  That path could save you development time, which you could probably use for better purposes on other projects.

market samurai is quite good for rank tracking, keyword research etc - http://www.marketsamurai.com/  decent price too.

I know what you mean about keeping your skills up to date though. 

Thanks for all the replies

@ edo Rank Tracker is actually the one that I have been using for the past few years and generally have found it quite good, although I've had some issues over the last few months with it not being as accurate as it used to be for UK serps and also a lot of prompts for captcha entries.  I take it you are not finding such issues?

@ Rooftop Yeah, if I do end up going for a paid solution raventools is definitely one I will consider, I've not used before but heard a lot of good things about it...

@ Will.Spencer Any particular reason you would go for PHP over PERL for something like this? I have no objection to using another language over PERL just strikes me as more geared towards this kind of project

@thesaintv12 market samurai is something I've heard mentioned before and kept meaning to check out, thanks for the reminder

The general consensus seems to be that I am trying to reinvent the wheel, which I agree with to a point, although I think there are obvious benefits to developing your own tools. Not necessarily cost savings so much but understanding exactly how the tools you use work and being able to see where the flaws lie and how they can be improved upon.

I haven't found a public tool which works properly for worldwide or specific location searches  and even for UK/US ones I sometimes worry about whether the results returned are messed with by Google because they suspect its a rank checker.  I think sometimes you have to roll your own.

I can definitely understand the appeal and need of an in-house tracker.

I was running a (bad) in-house one against raven for about 5 months and didn't spot any great inconsistencies in results. However I do find all the publicly available trackers to be rather stuck in the 90s.    Search has changed quite a bit since then, yet all that is getting reported is standard placements under default settings.

Now that the #1 organic result is actually below the fold on so many terms that does seem rather limited.  It also means lots of opportunities are missed.

We've got some pretty clear plans for what we want in a rank tracker.  Whether it would suit anyone else I have no idea.

I have a PHP one, come to think of it the actual collecting has very little code involved. most of the time was taken on db structure considerations and gui.

I was wondering when you might arrive on this one BoL :-)

rank checking as per I dont think is a problem. if anyone is after rank tracking let me know, ive got 250k terms running across G and Bing just now.

The question (for me) is how you layout the data and visualise it. e.g. overstock I have 30K terms they rank for.  The terms really need prioritised/categorised i think. Other than that its easy to report the data.

Ideally I'd have a plugin for backlink data, wouldnt it be nice to map rankings and backlinks together for an SEO campaign. Majestic would be good for this but they are quite strict about their data usage.

it would - although then you get into whether you map when links were placed or when they were crawled (which sounds like a pain to me!)

I try and flag a load of other things as well, but where do you stop once you get started?

Indeed, there's also the question of whether you're interested in checking the PPC listings too. Checking a particular term every hour is quite handy for finding out when companies turn their PPC on and off... but you needs lots of IPs to do that kind of frequent checking for lots of terms.

Also Google property listings, local listings, is an indented result, has sitelinks etc

Then other metadata. domain IPs, IP block info, WHOIS info, pagerank of pages, alexa traffic rankings, KW prominence on the page.....

Depends on the purpose of the checking I guess, but there's plenty to consider.