Question: Rank Reporter can’t find any of my rankings, but when I search Google/Yahoo/Bing my page is listed. What’s wrong?
Answer: There are a few common reasons why Rank Reporter may not find your site, they are explained below:
1. Is Rank Reporter is out of date?
Check to make sure the version of Rank Reporter you are using is current. We only publish search engine updates for the latest release, so you may need to update if you bought your copy some time ago. You can check if an update is available by using “Help | About” from the main menu. Click the “Look for Updates” link on the “About” screen.
2. Are Queries being Blocked by Search Engines?
Most major search engines (especially Google) will actively block your IP address if you send too many queries in a short period of time. To prevent this from happening Rank Reporter automatically waits between sending queries. The wait period are determine by the Keyword Interval and Result Page Interval values in Advanced Project Settings. If you lower these intervals it can cause your IP address to be blocked. We do not recommend lowering these values from the defaults.
If your IP address does become blocked, do not panic. It will not affect your ranking and the blockage is temporary (usually only lasting an hour or two). You can tell if your queries are blocked as you will see a message in the Log about your search being “Redirected”.
If you want to query a large number of keywords in a shorter period of time, you must use Rank Reporter’s proxy feature. This allows you to run your queries through multiple proxy servers to make your single IP address appear like multiple IPs. You must provide your own proxy servers (Inspyder does not offer this as a service).
3. Is the Root URL a Domain Name Mismatch?
The second reason that Rank Reporter may not find your site ranking is if the domain name in the Root URL field does not match the domain name that is indexed by the search engine. The most common example is when your website is indexed without a “www.” prefix in the search results, but you’ve entered it with the “www.” prefix in the Root URL.
For example, if your Root URL is “www.example.com”, but Google has your results listed with just “example.com” (notice that there is no leading “www”), then you should change your Root URL in Rank Reporter to match what Google has (“example.com”).
Rank Reporter checks that the search result URL begins with your Root URL. This allows Rank Reporter to match subfolders and your content pages if they appear in the results. The protocol prefix (http or https) is ignored.