How to Know if You’re Ranked on Google?

You want to know where your site is ranked on Google for specific keywords? I’d think you’d need a tool for this..

You can get a list of your pages that are indexed within Google via the site: command:
site:mysite.com

You can also use Google Webmaster Tools for a more enhanced breakdown on indexing.

If you use Google Analytics you could also probably tell how people are reaching your page, thus knowing what keywords they are entering.

There is software that’ll rank check for you, but automated queries to Google is somewhat frowned upon to be honest. I’m sure there’s a few web based tools that’ll do a similar thing too should you so desire.

Just to check though, are you sure your site is actually indexed?
Type site:www.yoursite.com into Google and see what comes back.

If it’s nothing, then you won’t be ranking for anything just yet.

Hey… thanks for the replies.

Hmm… well looks like it isn’t indexed… it doesn’t show up for site: mysite.com.

It does however show up if I just type in mysite.com… does that mean anything?

I have vague memories that you were having problems with your robots.txt / blog privacy setting the other week. Are you sure that’s entirely resolved?

(there’s no space in site:mysite.com by the way, just in case that’s what you’ve typed)

Yup give us a URL aswell if possible and maybe somebody can spot a potential issue!

Yes I did type a space, lol… thanks.

Ok now I see that it IS there. So basically it is ranked somewhere in Google?

Yes that was me actually, but for another site.

The site was ranking on Google but the description wasn’t showing up. It may have been you who suggested checking the privacy settings, which happened to be set at “don’t let search engines see my blog”… so I changed it and it worked when it updated again… so thanks if that was you, lol :).

No worries, glad to help.

Quick crash course in Google though. Usually your site is crawled first (ie Googlebot comes along and grabs a page from your site), then it gets indexed (ie, the page is inserted into a massive database of other pages).

But how you rank for a search term depends on the quality of the page, how relevant it is, how many people link to you, how trustworthy you are etc. Pages are pulled out of the database and ordered accordingly to create the results page.

In your other case, you’d blocked search engines from finding out what was on your site. So even though Google might’ve found links to your site elsewhere on the web, since they couldn’t crawl it to find out what was on the page then you didn’t really stand much chance of ranking well.

Without seeing a site, its difficult to say for definite, but if you build a good page with quality stuff on it, get some decent links to your site, don’t try to do anything dodgy (hidden text etc), then usually the good rankings will follow. Patience is usually the key.

Actually we (I’m working with another guy) got our other site to the first spot on Google for the keyword we were tagetting after the privacy thing reset.

I know what you’re talking about with page quality, backlinks etc… and that’s exactly what we’re doing right now with the pages we’re building.

I’m slightly concerned with this new page though because it’s not showing up anywhere for the keyword we’re targetting… and based on the other pages I’ve looked at it should definitely be in the top ten (pages, not results) by now.

Is it possible that the page has been indexed by Google (shows up for site:site.com), but for some reason is still being indexed for the keyword we’re trying to target?

Like I said based on what else I’ve seen I would definitely expect it to be somewhere in the top ten page results.

Once again thanks for your help Alism.

There’s no way a new page, without any backlinks, would hit the top-10 for a keyword which has any competition what-so-ever. The only reason this would happen, is if there were no/very little competition for it.

Even so it could take a couple of days I think ? Not sure if it’s immediate for it to appear for some searches.

Post a link if you can and we’ll take a look. But not if it’s triple X rated involving barn yard animals and humorously shaped vegetables with activities that are only legal in certain parts of the Netherlands.

Seriously though, it sounds like you’re not doing too badly on the SEO front. Might be worth hanging out on one of the many SEO forums on the ‘net if you don’t want to post your URL here.

It’s nothing illegal, but not a link I think I should be posting on here, lol.

Any particular forums you recommend?

xdesi… we do have backlinks and the content is quite highly optimized for the keyword we’re targetting.

We’ve done this already for another page and another keyword and did quite well… our new page is going against more competition though. Like I said I meant top ten PAGES of results, i.e. really 100 results, not 10.

seochat or webmasterworld would be a good start.

Don’t forget to sign up for a google webmaster tools account, submit a sitemap etc too.

Best of luck.

Ya sitemap and all in one SEO pack are on there.

Thanks again for the help :).

Ok new question.

I don’t know if this is related or even relevant.

In my dashboard under “Other WordPress News” it says”RSS Error: XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 169, column 0″.

Is this a general WordPress error or something wrong with my blog in particular? Something wrong with my xml sitemap?

Thanks again for any help.