Thursday 8 May 2008

Homebrew Google Position finder for Keywords / Domain

SEO sites like http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker are great if you want to check out how your page ranks in Google for a given set of keywords, but you can only perform 5 searches per day using the free account :(.
There are others out there that will let you perform lots of searches, but restrict you to the first 100 results.

Apparently Google limits a given user to only so many (1000?) searches per day before having to use a CAPTCHA to perform subsequent searches, which I guess is understandable.

But what if you want to do more than 5 but less than 1000? And you want to scan the first 1000 results, because your site is really crap and you want to see if it's getting better? Luckily ,it is trivial to replicate the behaviour of SEOMOZ using simple screen scraping techniques. If you use the code below and install it on your localhost IIS you will be able to perform (practically) unlimited SEO searches. With the caveat that Google may at their whim change their HTML of course and hence break it!

Use at your own risk would be my advice.

You will need the latest .Net Framework 3.5 to run this. Create a new web app project in Visual Studio Pro 2008 or Web Dev Express and make a new .aspx page. Copy and paste the code below and voila, it should all work! (Oh yeah, you'll need a couple of images too if you want the nice AJAX effect - I suggest http://www.ajaxload.info/) If you are wondering it's Open Source so feel free to make it work better for you!


(Copy all to new .aspx page)

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