RankPulse: Track Google Ranks

Intro­duc­ing a tool that tracks and pub­lishes the daily changes in 1,000 dif­fer­ent key­words at Google.

RankPulse tracks and pub­lishes the daily changes in 1,000 dif­fer­ent key­words at Google. They focus on high com­pe­ti­tion key­words like "cars" and "free domain name" and present their find­ings in graph for­mat on their site.

This tool does not allow you to look at the his­tory of your own key­words, unless yours hap­pen to be in the 1000 they fol­low, so it's more use­ful for ana­lyz­ing the over­all changes in Google's algorithm.

The key­words list includes pop­u­lar and highly com­pet­i­tive key­words, cho­sen "with the inten­tion of cov­er­ing a broad spec­trum of the internet."

The front page shows their "RankPulse Index," which graphs "the num­ber of posi­tions web­sites moved within the top ten for a par­tic­u­lar key­word among the 1000 key­words that we track."

Dur­ing updates the index climbs to over 17,000, while 2,500 appears about aver­age for a day. If the index maxed out — the high­est it can reach is 110,000, that means that every "web­site in the top ten of every key­word we track was replaced by new websites."

Beneath the index they show the web­sites and key­words they're rank­ing for that have gained and lost the most rank for the day.

Click on a key­word and you can see the sites that cur­rently rank in the top ten, and graph these sites against each other to see their his­tor­i­cal performance.

For exam­ple, "con­tent man­ager" was a recent big mover, with IBM soar­ing to a #1 spot. His­tor­i­cally I can see that IBM's gone in and out of #1, but in dra­matic rises and plum­mets, per­haps indi­cat­ing a faulty SEO tech­nique or Google's weight of back links.

Far­ther down their front page you can find 21 key­words that have had the most rank change activ­ity. Below that you'll find some inter­est­ing stats that track the terms that have sites with fixed posi­tions in the top 1 and 3 positions.

Best uses? Ana­lyze the com­po­nents (back­links, onpage ele­ments) of a con­sis­tantly top-ranking site. Look and see who recently dropped from the top ten for a term and fig­ure out what they're doing wrong — espe­cially if you've recently dropped. Crack the Google algorithm.

Be sure to set aside an hour or more to inves­ti­gate this site — it's well worth the time. And be sure to post what you discover!