Rank Checker – SEOBook.com: Good but flawed.

Checking your ranking is one measure that can help you figure out whether you are actually making any progress. It will also help you to understand who is doing better than you are and how you can potentially compete with those guys. There are many professional ranking tools out there (e.g. Webposition). Some of them are good, some others useless. The free tools are usually worthless when it comes to checking rankings. I personally have seen very few accurate ranking tools, so I was excited when I found out that Aaron Wall had released a Rank Checker tool for Firefox. I generally trust Aaron’s tools as he spends a lot of resources to offer useful SEO tools to his readers and beyond. Having said that, the Rank Checker is seriously flawed as the Google rankings that I get from it are not accurate. For instance, for the word business card, my site is ranked in the top 10, but according to Rank Checker, it is not in top 30 on Google. I have tried it for multiple keywords and in almost every case, the ranking I get on Google is different from the one Rank Checker gives me. The tool definitely has a huge potential. It’s easy to use and easy to install. Best of all, it works with Firefox which is a big plus for me (I hate IE, I can’t help it). I would give this tool 4.5 out of 5 if the ranking for Google was accurate, but right now I can’t go over 3.