Question: When I try to collect ranking data with Rank Reporter, the “Log” says that one of my proxies is dead. However, when I manually test that proxy myself (or through Rank Reporter’s proxy checking feature) it says the proxy is working. What’s going on?
Answer: There are two ways that proxies can fail:
- The proxy can be offline entirely (i.e. the proxy is no longer working at all for any website)
- The proxy is online but its IP address is blocked by Google (so it doesn’t work when trying to communicate with Google)
The proxy checking feature built into Rank Reporter only validates the first type of failure; it checks that the proxy is up and running. It doesn’t not check to see if the proxy has been blocked by Google because this is usually a temporary failure and the proxy may resume working normally in a few hours.
When Rank Reporter reports in the Log that a proxy is dead, it can mean that either type of failure has occurred. If you manually test the proxy after, then the proxy is temporarily blocked by Google and will resume working in a few hours.
Rank Reporter automatically removes “dead” proxies from the rotation (no matter what the failure type is) so that it doesn’t extend the IP ban from Google. These proxies are not removed from the global proxy list (so they can be used again the next time you run your