Check Your Search Engine Ranking In Google, Yahoo, and Bing

The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use.

Open up your browser and go to Google’s homepage. Type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So, if your site was ilovedogs.com you’d type info:ilovedogs.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.

This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate as far as telling you all the sites that are linked back to yours, but what you can learn from this is which backlinks matter.

From here you can also see the last day Google spidered your home page. To see this in action, click on the first group of information links, Show Google’s cache of yoursitename.com. If you look next to the word cached on the first line, the date is expressed also. Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.comand www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure and check both.

Yahoo’s Webmaster Resources will tell you how to find out what sites are linking to you, give you the results for how many pages of your site are in Yahoo, and more.

Bing has a good section for site owners, including information about Bing’s web crawler and site indexing. As the page in the help section states, you can use site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date of last caching.

Google Rankings is a great site for checking your rankings with Google. You’ll need a free Google API key for this one, and the site also has the direct link telling you where to get one. You’ll have to enter this key in order to query the site for information on Google.

With Google Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine. They also have some other tools that will track your keywords over time, as well as one they call the Ultimate SEO Tool that will measure your site’s keyword density.

LilEngine.com’s Backlink Checker will measure the number of links you have pointing back to your site against competing sites. Handy if you just want a quick comparison of how many links you have versus others, though how much getting more links back will help varies, depending on other factors.

From the same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using Yahoo Search Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo rankings, it’s quite helpful. You can find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API at their developer’s site.