Handy Javascript bookmarklet for Chrome

In the pursuit of high rankings in Google organic search via SEO, much of the work involves tracking how competitors' pages rise and fall in response to both on-page changes and Google's changes to its ranking algorithms.

Doing this manually requires performing periodic Google searches on your most important keywords to find rank order of pages, then opening and studying those of most interest - usually pages that have top rankings, or have risen in rankings since your last check. The objective being, of course, to see what kind of changes to pages Google likes (and doesn't like).

Doing this kind of check directly from Google search-return pages requires an intermediate step between (a) receiving Google's rank-ordered list of SERPs, looking like this:

and (b) extracting the URLs from SERPs of interest and clicking through to the pages.

A little Javascript bookmarklet that you can add to your Chrome bookmarks provides a great shortcut from doing the Google search to viewing the corresponding list of URLs without having to wade through Google's SERPs like the one shown above.

To create the Javascript bookmarklet:

1. Go here www.davidhboggs.com/demos/ExtractURLSfromSERPS.txt and copy the Javascript snippet to your clipboard.
2. On a new Chrome tab, do Bookmark This Page.
3. Name the new bookmark ExtractURLSfromSERPS or anything you'll remember.
4. Click the EDIT button and paste the Javascript snippet from your clipboard into the URL field overwriting anything that may be there now.
5. Save the new bookmark.

Note that although the default Google SERP page contains 20 SERPs, you can get up to 100 at a time by changing a Google setting. To do that:

1. On the page of Google SERPs you just created, on the top menu click Settings then Search settings.
2. Scroll down to Results per page where you can choose 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100.

To use the bookmarklet:

1. Do a Google search on one of your most important keyword phrases.
2. When the page of Google SERPs has loaded, open your Bookmarks and click on the one you just created.

A list of URLs behind the Google SERPs will then open in a new tab. For purposes of example I've done a search on "visit boston" for which the bookmarklet produces this list of URLs (only top 10 shown here):

For purposes of future tracking, you can copy from that list and paste into an Excel spreadsheet, using Paste Special|Text.

I've used the Chrome browser in my example, but the bookmarklet can be added to any browser that will permit you to edit the URL of bookmarks.