«
»

Rank checking on Google’s SERPs

Since everyone else seems to be releasing free/not quite free Google SERP ranking trackers, in the spirit of “what the hell they’ll change the code tomorrow anyway”, here’s the (Perl) regular expression I’ve been using for my own Google SERP tracker:

[perl]while ($content =~ m{

]*?)>(?:.*?)

(.*?).*?

.*?<(?:font size=-1|div class=(?:sml|std))>(?:((?:\w|).*?)
.*?)?(.*?)(?:)?(?:]*?)>Cached – )?(?:Similar pages)?(?:)?(.*?).*?}gi) {}
[/perl]

Of course it’s up to you to figure out the rest of the code surrounding the regex :)

Will Google ever stop this madness by actually creating a decent API to their results pages?

Update: Aargh – thanks to Wordpress’s impossible handling of smart-quotes, that code is broken by the smart quotes peppered throughout it – do a search and replace to fix that…

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Google, Perl, Regular Expressions, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Rank checking on Google’s SERPs”

  1. Eric Giguere says:
    June 16, 2008 at 11:09 pm

    Actually, I haven’t yet decided if I’ll charge for my tool or not. It’s free for now, at least :-)

    Fun what you can do with regular expressions.

    Eric
    aka “The Toolinator”

  2. rob says:
    June 17, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    Very true – your link text has now been swapped around with Joost’s, which is charged for ;)

  3. Rob Wallace says:
    February 5, 2009 at 3:49 pm

    FYI The link above to the “not quite free” product is unavailable. I found a tool at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ haven’t tested it yet gotta get my google API which somehow dissappeared from the site I need to get rankings on.

Leave a Reply