Where am I on Google?

I just finished a lens about my start on Squidoo with a few little tips I learned along the way. That lens has led to a similar lens (still a Work in Process) with references to more tools I use for Squidoo. There was a lot of material for me to try to organize, as I’d kept notes of all activities over the course of a month and a half trying to figure out how the whole thing worked (I’m better than when I started, but still have a lot to learn!). While going through those notes, I started to wonder: Where exactly were all my lenses in Google? I know the ones that come up on the first page for my keyword or phrase, but I stopped tracking the others as my lens count grew.

Distracted by that thought, I went to my favorite search tool – Google itself – to see if I couldn’t find out without having to put in my keyword or phrase for each of my 37 lenses and count all the listings that come before me (for some lenses that would be more counting than I’m prepared to do, unfortunately).

Sure enough, I found Rank Checker, a Firefox add-on tool you can use to find your lens position on Google. If you use Firefox, download the Rank Checker add-on. You’ll have to restart Firefox but then you’ll see a little blue globe with orange flames in the bottom-right of your browser. Click on that globe and the Rank Checker settings box opens up. You can’t enter individual pages within a domain, but you can enter squidoo.com as the domain and enter your keyword or phrase for each lens. Click “start” on the bottom of the Rank Checker box and the query will start to run, giving you the Google and Yahoo position for whatever lens it finds first for that phrase. Watch out, it might not be your lens. In fact, your lens might not come up at all – an indication that you’re not ranking well for that keyword or phrase. You can save the settings and name the file Squidoo so you can rerun it whenever you want by clicking the “open” tab and selecting your Squidoo file. You can also export the results to a CSV file and then open it with Excel to save the data and track your movements over time. As I use my keyword phrase in my lens URL, it was easy enough to set this up and find most of my lenses.