There's a fair bit to it, but nothing overly complex. Obviously, you need proxies, local Google sites, throttling limits, different user agents each which show a different formatting of results, etc. Then Google will also sometimes spit out different results depending on where the proxy IP is located. For example, you may get different results if the proxy is located in Italy vs. the US.
Again, there's a fair bit to it, but nothing that's mind-blowingly complex. If you wanted some help with it, feel free to drop me a PM.
Thanks, besides proxies these are probably the parts I would have overlooked. But as you say, it doesn't sound too complex.
Preface: Keep in mind that I know virtually nothing about programming.
Instead of having to reinvent the wheel, wouldn't it be possible to use something like the rank checker in scrapebox, export those results to a database and setup the interface to work with that. Theoretically, you'd be able to chart results over time, automate graphing and position changes.
I know that a ton of scrapebox stuff can be automated, but I'm not sure if the rank checker can be. Naturally you'd still need your VPS or Dedi plus proxies, but you'd need those with a custom built solution anyway.
Like I said, I don't even know if that's possible or easier than going full custom from scratch, but I'd think putting something like that together would probably be lest costly than 5k.
Thanks for the input, as I don't have any dev experience either I don't know if that would work but honestly I would rather try to avoid using a Windows program for this system, I don't think it would work as smooth, but what do I know.
Just pay for a SaaS like Authority Labs, there's really no reason to build your own save for the learning experience. If you just want your own rank tracker, it's stupid to invest in a developer to build you one unless you have really unique feature requests or something else odd like that.
Scraping Google isn't hard, but when you want to recreate local results accurately it becomes a bitch.
And building something reliable and feature rich with a good interface should cost way more than $5k. No one here fucking appreciates what good development and design work really costs. Thinking "all I want is a rank tracker, $5k is too expensive" is a useless mindset without having a full technical spec/feature list to base that opinion off of. $5k could be really cheap or really expensive depending on your needs and front end requirements. A shitty app that spits out a CSV daily of rankings could be done for cheap, a well thought out front end with a good AJAX based UI should cost wayyyyy more than $5k
Obviously I want to own this thing and get my customers to sign up for it. Otherwise it would make no sense of course. I don't need anything feature rich, basically what it should be able to do is:
* create user accounts
* let user add urls and keys
* track rankings once per day (one country would be enough if this makes it less complex)
* in the userinterface show position for keywords from today,yesterday,last week,last month (no fancy graphs needed)
* maybe save the whole ranking history for each keyword in another part (also only the positions as numbers)
* the userinterface does not need to look good, but isn't it even easier to use a themeforest theme for this?
That's basically what I want it to be able to do for now.
Any idea how many hours a somewhat experienced programmer would need for this setup? As I said, it's not that I don't appreciate the art of programming, but it is very hard for me to judge how long this would really take someone to do.
