Tracking SEO ranking

[stephanos]

I would love to extract the SEO ranking information that Google
includes with its links. I found many articles suggesting to create a
filter to do this.

But in my situation this is not an option - since I want to process
many accounts and don't want to rely on manual efforts on the user
side.

Is there ANY way to extract this info via the API?

Cheers!

[chris@shufflepoint]

There are three ways of getting Google's rank info

1. use filters

2. add server-side (PHP,etc.) code to extract rank from referrer and
inject into customvar

3. add client-side code (JS) to extract rank from referrer and inject
into customvar

So for a generic solution, you would use #2 or #3. #3 is probably the
most generic since it doesn't depend upon server-side implementation.
See this article and read the comments also.

http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-with-google-analytics/

Another options is to sign up for the excellent ZoomRank service. Then
you can get ranking for other engines and also get average weekly and
monthly historicals.

Chris Harrington
ShufflePoint, Inc.

[stephanos]

Thanks for your great reply.
HM, so manual efforts seems inevitable.

I figured since it's GOOGLE analytics that it might already save this
referral data somewhere. Shame.
Maybe they should, I think it would definitely be a great alternative
to active page rank tracking...

[stephanos]

Now that I think even more about it - I think GA really needs a
ga:fullsource or ga:sourcelink which would basically be ga:source +
ga:referralPath WITHOUT filtering out query parameters for search
engines. This would have two advantages: People could do passive SERP
without any manual efforts (extra script/filter) and it would
theoretically even work for historic data since I assume the data is
still there.

[chris@shufflepoint]

More likely they will add a new dimension since it would be consistent
with their handling of these parameters. You should post it as a
feature request.

[stephanos]

done :)

http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=2456

[chris@shufflepoint]

I added a comment to your entry to suggest the idea that there be a ga:averageRank dimension - or would that be a metric? "Rank" is descriptive, which makes me think it is a dimension. But "average rank" behaves more like a metric.