Check your Google Ranking 1,000 times per day
... without getting banned! – by Ian Cook

As you've probably heard, Google isn't fond of people using automated rank checking programs to monitor their search engine positioning. In extreme cases they've even been known to deny access to people who've abused such tools by relentlessly querying their engine.

Regardless, knowing where your site ranks is still as important as ever and recently Google provided an solution to this problem with the release of the Google API.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a formalized set of software calls and routines that can be referenced by an application program in order to access supporting network services.

This means that Google has provided independent programmers with the building blocks needed to create automated programs that access the Google index in a Google-Authorized manner.

A company called Rim Fusion has used this API to create a program called Rim Fusion Rank Position that will locate and report your web site's ranking in Google's search results for a given keyword. Check out the screen shot to the right:

Google keeps track of the users of their API by requiring all users to use a License Key when accessing Google via the API. Getting a License Key is free, and allows you up to 1000 queries per day.

One query gets you a response of 10 search results. So if your page is located in position #25, it'll cost you 3 queries to locate it. If your page is located in position #600, it'll cost you 60 queries to locate it. As you can see, it's unlikely you'll run up against your daily query limit, and if you do, it just means that you'll have to wait until the next day before you can continue your searches.

The Google API terms and conditions currently prohibits commercial use of the API. That's probably why all of the programs thus far are free as is signing up for the API license...