Hey Don,

Yes MS's Rank Tracker has been way off. A good alternative is this Rank Tracker from SEO Powersuite. It's free and 100% correct.

then again...it pays to see for yourself I guess...its for Mac also.

hmmm accurate? not too sure. Ok for example...

Goto Google.com and search for "Costa Rica News" without the brackets. Make sure you are not logged in to Gmail or anything either. Tell me what www.costaricanewssite.com ranks at.

Because MS and Rank Tracker are reporting relatively the same data but the real world is saying something all together different.

And many others see it at #3 and #4. So what is it I wonder?

I find it interesting how the recent update from Google virtually renders your typical SEO...useless. Imagine if everyone sees different results? What then happens to organic search?

Ranks at position 11 (1 in the second page).

I have aslo gotten conflicting readings with Sam. Dunno

I get your site at 9.

I own a few of the main software packs and have to disagree with trytolearnmore as RT is wildly wrong and terribly slow for me. Tonight I checked my site for about 100 keywords that I rank for and RT hardly got any of the correct positions. Matter of fact over the past couple of weeks RT, Samurai, WebCEO have all been wrong. Now even my favourite, Traffic Travis, is going through a bad patch. But at least it is super fast, has no captchas and gets the right rankings when it gets them. Lately it is missing ranked spots in some kind of random pattern. Good thing though, is that TT support is fantastic.

Lately I've been getting really weird SEOC out of Mkt Sam. For example:

whitening teeth - 230K SEOC (Mkt Sam) vs 1.02M in Google (both are phrase search).

That's just one example, I've got many more examples. Anybody else experiencing this? Any insight? (And I already understand the different data centers, etc., but the number of keywords with these big differences seems to be growing).

Does it matter if I'm using paid proxies? Thanks for any insight.

It's common for google to show different results for different countries. It's due to their geo targeting feature that they've got going on. So while for "costa rica news", you might be top 3 in costa rica, in US it could be lower down or in 2nd page or so.

The MS team has re-introduced several filters: SEOUC (URL Comp) SEOTC (Title Comp) SEOCTR. Key difference: once you've filtered your keywords you have to hit the "check" link to get those metrics. This was done to avoid big G having a hissy fit and banning your ip. They also squashed some RT bugs. Hopefully, they'll do a full blog post later today. I found all this out cuz, well, I opened her up.

Have you tried Traffic Travis 4.0, you can try basic version which is free and you can check Search Engine Ranking.

And you can do the same in MS. I wasn't aware that 4 had a basic version. I may go check it out.

New update to MS today that brings back a bunch of features in the Keyword Research area.

Anyone know about both MS and SEO Power Suite - How they compare?

I use SEO Quake which you can use as add on to various browsers works great with Chrome and firefox :-) and its free!

Many fellow bloggers are bought and using this. Never heard of any problem. Just thinking to buy or not when came across this post. Thanks for the list of free products. Nothing wrong in trying the free ones first.


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I noticed the problem with rankings when I went to Thailand recently. I checked with both local google and what I thought was general google and they brought back different results, but when I was in Thailand I got completely different results. And when I use a proxy ( I was curious to see what happened) or several proxies spread throughout the world same thing, different rankings. Sometimes rankings went up, sometimes down. I tried using MS and also MNF and got different numbers as well. Interesting and I would like to know why.

I see it at position 5 in Google. That's using Firefox. Don't know if that makes any difference. And then I checked at a site check site. Does this help?

http://www.rapidsitecheck.com/result...anewssite.com/

Sylvia

Agreed. What he said. I bought MS in 2008 and though I've looked at other KW tools, I've always stuck with it. People seem to forget that when MS removes certain features, it is because Google has changed something. Google is constantly trying to make life hard for KW software developers. And I can't even begin to guess at how difficult it must be to (a) keep up with the changes, which the team has done) and (b) simultaneously code new features in. I've not once regretted my purchase and remember MS does a LOT more than "just" keyword research. It also comes down to your preference as well. I prefer to be able to look at the metrics and decide for myself whether or not I want to go after a particular niche and set of keywords. I mistrust ANY software that "does it for me." This doesn't mean that the software is no good, it just means I prefer to do things a bit independently. Trust me: you will not go wrong with MS.

hahaha, well Don that is because it WILL rank differently all over god's green earth. You site will rank differently on google.com .ca .co.uk .fr etc, etc

Are you located in costa rica?

My suggestion is to add your site to google webmasters as it gives you a pretty good idea how your site is ranking for every keyword and you can set filters depending on the country, and type of traffic (I always set mine to web, and USA)

BTW, have you noticed that Market Samurai is the longest Commercial BETA version that floats around... you can't blame them for the software lackness as this is BETA version (BETA version is not for real production)...

After BETA, we usually go to RC (Release Candidate)....

While MS's beta version took years of making, i wonder when the Final Version would be ?
i guess Market Samurai is the best top selling for beta version category...