Configuring Rank Tracker

Configuring Proxy Settings

If you are using a direct Internet connection, you don't need to configure your proxy settings. However, if you are behind a proxy server, you need to specify your proxy address, port, username and password. If unsure, please contact your network administrator to obtain this information.

To access proxy configuration in Rank Tracker, choose Preferences > Proxy Settings... from the navigation menu.

Configuring Search Safety Settings

1. Human Emulation

Human emulation is an advanced feature of Rank Tracker that improves the safety of rankings checks. If you enable it, Rank Tracker will emulate the way humans check rankings in a search engine.

This may be necessary in cases when you have a large project with many keywords to check. The thing is that when you send to frequent and numerous queries to a search engines, it may temporarily stop processing them. The service will be by all means renewed sometime afterwards (depends on the search engine).

To prevent such inconvenience or elevate existing problems during ranking checks you can enable Human emulation. To do this choose Preferences > Human Emulation... from the navigation menu. For bigger projects you may also want to increase the time of Random delays between queries together with Random delays before going to the next result page.

Note: The bigger delays you set, the longer it takes to check the rankings.

Note 2: You don't need this feature if you have search engine API keys.

2. User Agents' Rotation

User agents' rotation is another feature of Rank Tracker designed to increase search safety. You can set up Rank Tracker so that it will use a random user agent for each query. That way Google or other search engine will perceive each search request as actually coming from a different person.

By enabling User Agents' Rotation you can prevent temporary blocks of service by the search engines which sometimes occur when you make too frequent multiple automated queries.

To enable User Agents' Rotation go to Preferences > Search Safety Settings > User Agents and select Use Random User Agents feature.

Configuring Preferred Search Engines

Preferred search engines are set up per project and Rank Tracker will use them whenever you check you rankings within this project later on. This way, you don't have to scroll down a long list of all the available search engines and select the right ones each time you check your rankings.

You can change your preferred search engines at any time by selecting Preferences > Preferred Search Engines... from the navigation menu. Currently Rank Tracker supports 687 search engines.

Using Search Engines API Keys

Rank Tracker fully supports Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Wordtracker API keys.

These keys make sure you never violate search engines' policies, but also limit the number of searches you can perform using these search engines.

With Google API, the number of queries you can perform daily using one API key is limited to 1,000.

Note: As of December 5, 2006, Google stopped issuing new API keys. If you have an existing API key obtained prior to December 5, 2006, you should not be affected. For more information please visit:
http://code.google.com/apis/soapsearch/api_faq.html.

If you wish to use a Google, Yahoo!, Bing or Wordtracker API key within Rank Tracker, select Preferences > Search Engines API Keys... from the navigation menu.

Simply copy and paste your existing API key here.

If you don't have an API key that you need use the following links to create a new one:

Get a Yahoo! API Key

Get a Bing API Key

Get a Wordtracker API Key

Note: Unlike search engine API keys, Wordtracker API key will give you access to the paid services of Wordtracker. This way you'll be able to get more keyword suggestions than with the free version. However Wordtracker will charge extra for this.

Configuring Max Number Of Results To Check

To configure the maximum number of results Rank Tracker should search through when checking your rankings, choose Preferences > Miscellaneous Settings... from the navigation menu, and enter a number from 10 to 1,000:

Note: The bigger number you set, the longer it'll take to check the rankings. For best performance, we recommend setting the number to 30 as this is the maximum number of rankings most search engine users tend to view.

Configuring Preferred (Canonical) Domain Settings

When search engines index your site, they can choose to store its URL with or without the "www" part (that is, either www.your-domain.com, or simply your-domain.com.) This can sometimes lead to problems when performing a rankings check. If you're checking your rankings for the your-domain.com site, and, say, Google has indexed your site as www.your-domain.com, you won't be able to find your site in the search results.

To make sure your site is always found in the search results no matter how search engines have indexed it, choose Preferences > Miscellaneous Settings... from the navigation menu, and enable the Treat www and non-www versions of the domain as the same site checkbox.

Configuring Difference in Ranking Results

If you go to Preferences > Miscellaneous Settings you can configure what kind of data will be shown in the Difference column (e.g. Google Difference)

You can set Rank Tracker to compare the latest measured rankings to those of 1, 3 or 7 days old, the first rankings checked with the tool, etc.

Configuring Case Sensitive Search

If you target case-sensitive keywords and want Rank Tracker to treat upper and lower cases differently you need to go to Preferences > Miscellaneous Settings and check the box Treat upper case and lower case letters as different symbols.

Configuring Rank Checking Method

As you gain experienced in using Rank Tracker you may wish to experiment with Rank Checking Method to save time while doing your daily checks. Go to Preferences > Miscellaneous Settings and choose the ranking method that you believe will be most effective for your current project. You'll find detailed descriptions of each method right in the settings window.

Configuring Customer Profile

In Preferences > Customer Profile you can fill in information about the customer whose site's ranking is being checked. The program will use these data when generating a Search Engine Rankings Report. Please specify Customer name, their e-mail, website address, physical address and logo. These data have to be filled in for each project.

Note: By filling in the Customer profile you give a personal touch to the look and feel of your reports so that your customers feel the report was created specifically for them.

Configuring your Company Profile

If you go to Preferences > Company Profile you'll be able to fill in the data on your own company. The tool will use this data when generating a Search Engine Rankings Report, see an example.

Please specify your company name, their e-mail, website address, physical address and logo. These data have to be filled in only once, and Rank Tracker will use it for all projects.

Note: By filling in your Company Profile you build on your business reputation and gain trust in the eyes of the customer creating a custom looking report.

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