I thought I would ask and share…using rank tracker software, how safe is it…I was using rank tracker software (link assistant) for about 2 – 3 weeks, checking regularly as we cleaned up our html code and wanted to see the positive results, if any. After about a week we noticed a nice bump up from page 2 to 1 for most of our targetted KW’s. Wow, we thought, great! Then after about another week all the while checking OZ, NZ and U.S SE’s every 2 – 3 days we noticed a VERY sharp decline in ranking (+80 in some cases/KW’s), looking for reasons after such a nice bump was of course a given.

Then it hit us and we started searching, it seems when you use google’s services TOO much especially while logged in to your G account, your site can actually get a penalty and that has actually happened to us before although we were not using rank tracking software but just overusing normal search for the same keyword (probably about 20 checks in a minute or so and we got locked out of being able to search, until we reset the internet connection).

Google must log your IP address, lookup to see if you have a G account or are logged in then somehow if it can determine you have a website related to that g account or I.P address they will filter out your website. It happened to us for about 2 weeks the first time, and about 3 weeks when we seemed to overuse the rank tracker software. We regularly clean cookies and not just through explorer/mozilla, we have very good software that deep cleans the cookies and junk that normally gets missed such as index.dat and others.

SO, be careful about using google search TOO much when checking your serp ranks, because from our experience your site can go into no man’s land as a precaution (in googles eyes) as they somehow think you are trying to manipulate serp’s so we definately agree with the above post (personalized results) but would like to add our experience and to also ask, if any software out there uses proxies or masks your IP address while doing the serp checking on your behalf ?

BTW overall rank tracker (link assistant) is really, really good but we are trying to determine that if it uses your IP address that google has already logged and possibly assigned to your account or personalised search profile, whether it’s just showing you what you want to see, or if it is indeed the true google results as joe blow would see if search from a fresh, never used computer…..

Relying on google for your main source of income is a big NO NO in our opinion because with each Algo update you risk the chance that your site will go “dancing” or simply vanish, it happens everyday so please try to put your eggs in bing/yahoo’s basket as well, we’ve found those SE’s to be a fair bit more stable than google.

Peace y’all, have a wonderful day.

It’s completely FREE, all you have to do is provide a link back to their homepage at http://www.CuteRank.net.

It’s not quite as user-friendly has RankTracker but Kevin and his team are working very hard on improvements on a daily basis.