http://www.merseyinternet.com/serendipity/ Web Design and Development for Liverpool Businesses en http://www.merseyinternet.com/serendipity/templates/bulletproof/img/s9y_banner_small.png http://www.merseyinternet.com/serendipity/ 100 21 http://www.merseyinternet.com/serendipity/archives/Rank-Decoding-Engine-An-Initial-Review.html Have you tried Michelle MacPhearson's Rank Decoding Engine from <a href="http://www.crowdmountainsite.com" title="Crown Mountain Site">http://www.crowdmountainsite.com<br /> </a><br /> <br /> It's a great piece of free software that will help you find out which sites Google rates most highly in your particular niche.<br /> <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> To make my life simpler I just chose a single keyword phrase (in reality you would choose nearer 10 phrases)<br /> <br /> On my test the top Crowd Mountain results were:<br /> <br /> site1.com 3 results<br /> site2.com 2 results<br /> etc<br /> <br /> and on my manual test I was able to check site1.com and see its 3 results were in positions 17, 37 and 39 <br /> and site2.com was in positions 6 and 8<br /> <br /> 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.<br /> 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)?<br /> <br /> 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. <br /> <br /> Just something to think about.<br /> <br /> <hr /><br /> <br /> BUG ALERT <br /> <br /> I think I have found a bug as well although I really need to test this a bit more.<br /> <br /> site1.com was actually uk.com and The Rank Decoding Engine reported it as having 3 results in my test.<br /> But when I looked the sites were actually<br /> <br /> www.feathers.uk.com<br /> www.historic-uk.com<br /> www.hotels.uk.com<br /> <br /> so historic-uk.com shouldn't have been counted.<br /> <br /> <hr /><br /> <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> Mike Kay<br /> Mersey Internet.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Mersey Internet nospam@example.com (Mike Kay) 2010-04-18T20:20:20Z http://www.merseyinternet.com/serendipity/wfwcomment.php?cid=5 1 http://www.merseyinternet.com/serendipity/rss.php?version=1.0&type=comments&cid=5