Problems associated with rank tracking tools

Free SEO rank tracking software tools are of many different types and forms and each one of them have their own unique pros and cons. The availability of a huge number of these tools/software often makes it hard for people to select the right one. That is why you need to engage in some serious research in order to come up with the right tool that will serve your needs perfectly. Back in the day when SEO was just starting to become a thing, SEO professionals only relied on ensuring that their websites ranked number one in search engine results. They relied a lot on tracking tools to monitor how their keywords perform over time. Later, it became clear that tracking keywords and ensuring that they stay on the first page simply wasn’t enough. This was because being ranked number one by Google doesn’t create any value if your keywords being in very little traffic. Thus, tracking alone has been determined not to be an adequate way of determining SEO success. As such, other metrics started to be incorporated together with rank tracking to determine how successful keywords are.

Should we track ranking?

Google has been improving a lot over the course of the years it has been in existence. All the improvements that the most popular search engine has accumulated over the years make it very difficult to track keyword rank. There are several problems that are associated with rank tracking that any SEO expert should know about. Let us take a look at some of them.

Google doesn’t like keyword tracking tools

Yes, you read that right. Google doesn’t like any of the rank tracking tools out there. In fact, Google hates these tools and I will tell you why. In order to understand why Google doesn’t like rank tracking tools, you need to start by understanding how Google makes its money. The main sources of revenue for this humongous search engine are ads and sponsored results.

However, rank tracking tools do not contribute in any way to the revenue that Google generates and as if that wasn’t enough, they also use the server resources of the search engine. So, we have rank tracking tools that use Google’s server resources while contributing zero revenue to the company and you still wonder why Google doesn’t like rank tracking tools?

Google has also developed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that exist to let developers obtain keyword ranking data without the need for Google’s user interface. As such, developers have access to all rank tracking data they need at no cost. The only limitation with APIs is that there is a limit on how many API requests one can make in a single day. This limitation is what make rank tracking tools necessary because they scrape the ranking results from Google’s result pages directly.

What are CAPTCHA forms?

To limit the activities of rank tracking tools, Google usually uses CAPTCHA forms to make sure that API requests are made by human beings when they detect that rank tracking tools are trying to scrape data from their search result pages. To deal with the issue of CAPTCHA forms, developers have developed tools that can work around them. In response, Google usually temporarily blocks certain ID addresses if it detects too many queries coming from a given address in quick succession.