Search engine rankings are a measure of a site's visibility in the search engines. Being ranked #10,345 will not get your site any traffic, as few people ever go beyond the first three pages (top 30) of search engine results.
You can find out your search ranking results manually by entering a keyword phrase in a search engine to see where your webpages appear in the rankings.
Of course, monitoring your search engine rankings manually is only recommended if you have a tight budget, only a few pages and keyword phrases to check, and a lot of time on your hands.
Alternatively, you can monitor your search engine rankings quickly and efficiently using one of the many search engine ranking software programs, or online services.
Here is a software program that I use to check the search engine rankings of my sites and those of my clients:
I also offer a free online search engine ranking tool on my Mike’s Marketing Tools website.
Various factors can affect rankings reported by the search engines. These include time of day, indexing runs, traffic load, load balancing measures, server timeout, ongoing ranking jobs, etc.
Some search engines, such as Google, use multiple databases.
So search engine rankings aren’t necessarily 100% accurate, since they only present a snap shot of the rankings at a particular moment.
The search engine relationship chart shows the major search engines and the search engines that power their main, pay per click, web directory and backup search results. This will give you a quick overview of the major search engines and their relationships with other search engines.
| Search Engine | Main Search Results | Pay Per Click Results | Directory Results | Backup Results |
| AllTheWeb | Yahoo! | Overture | - | - |
| AltaVista | Yahoo! | Overture | Dmoz | - |
| AOL | Dmoz | - | ||
| Ask Jeeves | Teoma | - | - | |
| Dmoz | Dmoz | - | Dmoz | - |
| Go.com | - | - | ||
| Dmoz | - | |||
| HotBot | Inktomi | Lycos | - | - |
| iWon | Dmoz | - | ||
| LookSmart | WiseNut | LookSmart | LookSmart | WiseNut |
| Lycos | Fast Search | Lycos | Dmoz | LookSmart |
| MSN | Yahoo! | Overture | Dmoz | - |
| Netscape | Dmoz | - | ||
| Overture | - | Overture | - | Inktomi |
| Teoma | Teoma | Ask Jeeves | - | - |
| WiseNut | WiseNut | LookSmart | - | - |
| Yahoo! | Yahoo! | Overture | Yahoo! | - |
| Search Engine | Main Search Results | Pay Per Click Results | Directory Results | Backup Results |
This search engine chart shows the most popular or influential search engines and the part they play in other search engines.
| Main Results by Google | Pay Per Click by Google | Pay Per Click by Overture | Directory by Dmoz | Owned by Yahoo! |
| AOL | AOL | AllTheWeb | AltaVista | AllTheWeb |
| Go.com | Ask Jeeves | AltaVista | AOL | AltaVista |
| Go.com | MSN | Dmoz | Inktomi | |
| iWon | Overture | Overture | ||
| Netscape | iWon | Yahoo! | iWon | Yahoo! |
| Netscape | Lycos | |||
| MSN | ||||
| Netscape |