Notes from building RankJot — measurement, SEO, and what breaks.
7 min read
Twenty strangers requested a sign-in link and none of them ever signed in. It was list-bombing — and my rate limits were structurally blind to it. What the attack looks like, why per-IP and per-email limits miss it, and the reverse-proxy bug I found on the way.
Read →
6 min read
Google removed &num=100, so a rank check is paged ten results at a time and the paging stops the moment your domain turns up. That makes a keyword you rank well for cheap and one you don't expensive — plus the caching trick that does most of the work on margin.
Read →
6 min read
Cap keywords and a user can add five, delete them, add five more, and bill you for every lookup. Cap queries and the loophole closes. Also: the day I noticed my free tier was arithmetically guaranteed to hit 100% of its quota every month.
Read →
6 min read
It averages across every query, country and device a page appeared for, and it is computed only over impressions — so a keyword that falls far enough to stop being shown makes your reported average improve. Worked through with numbers.
Read →
6 min read
Rank data is only useful at the moment it changes, and a dashboard is a thing you have to remember to open. What it costs to build the product the other way round — including the part where a fully satisfied user looks exactly like a churning one.
Read →
7 min read
The theory: a complaint about price is proven willingness to pay. Several hundred threads later, the headline metric was useless and one stray comment was worth more than the whole exercise — including the part where it disagreed with my pricing.
Read →
Google keyword rank tracking that emails you when your positions move — the one-job alternative to $100–200/mo SEO suites. Free for 5 keywords. See how it works · Free rank checker · What it costs