Have you tried Michelle MacPhearson's Rank Decoding Engine from http://www.crowdmountainsite.com


It's a great piece of free software that will help you find out which sites Google rates most highly in your particular niche.

Unusually for such a great and useful program, it is actually possible to do what it does, yourself, manually. So I had a go, the hard way to see what I found.

To make my life simpler I just chose a single keyword phrase (in reality you would choose nearer 10 phrases)

On my test the top Crowd Mountain results were:

site1.com 3 results
site2.com 2 results
etc

and on my manual test I was able to check site1.com and see its 3 results were in positions 17, 37 and 39
and site2.com was in positions 6 and 8

So remember - the Rank Decoding Engine simply orders sites by the number of times they appear in the top 50 search results. It doesn't weight the sites by position.
I'm just wondering which site you would say had the most authority. The one that appears 3 times in the top 50 but at low positions (17, 37 and 39) or the one that appears twice at higher positions (6 and 8)?

What if a site came in at positions 1 and 2. The Rank Decoding Engine would rate it lower than a site that came in at 48, 49 and 50.

Just something to think about.

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BUG ALERT

I think I have found a bug as well although I really need to test this a bit more.

site1.com was actually uk.com and The Rank Decoding Engine reported it as having 3 results in my test.
But when I looked the sites were actually

www.feathers.uk.com
www.historic-uk.com
www.hotels.uk.com

so historic-uk.com shouldn't have been counted.

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Being a uk resident I'm looking forward to country specific versions but I'm more than happy with what we have at the moment. A really useful tool to add to the list.

Mike Kay
Mersey Internet.