Acorns

Tired of counting keyword rank?

I run a couple small web sites and track a handful of keywords for them weekly. They're not big enough for me to purchase dedicated rank reporting software, so I started by just counting down the Google results page.

That got tedious really quickly. My quick and cheap solution is simple: set the number of results per page to 100 and use a user style sheet to turn the search results into an HTML ordered list, the kind where each item is numbered. Then checking rank is just a matter of:

1. visiting a bookmarked search,
2. typing the site name to find it, and
3. copying the number to my spreadsheet.

Sometimes I also note which other sites rank above mine. For example, does another site's references to mine rank ahead of my own site?

My Google CSS style sheet looks like this:

            div.g {
              list-style-type: decimal;
              display: list-item;
              border-left: 5px blue solid;
            }
          

That last style, the left border, is just so if I see numbers in odd places on other pages, I'll notice that's probably because they use the same "g" class. As Google's search engine result pages. If that turns out to be a common problem, I might make my user style sheet site-specific.

To install a CSS style sheet like this one in Firefox, you create a userContent.css file under your profile directory. In Konqueror, you can configure your user style sheet under Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Stylesheets.

Update: It turns out that You get different search results when looking at the top 100 than the top 10 for spots 1-10. If you want to reliably see how your site ranks in the top ten, you have to look at ten results per page.