Going through SEOmoz's Indextools analytics recently, I noticed that while the popularity of tools like Linkscape & Trifecta have been growing rapidly, they're still not yet on par with our most popular tool, the Rank Checker:

There are tens of thousands of reports run each month on it - across every engine and TLD combination. Granted, it's a time saver, generally accurate and pretty reliable, but it still surprised me. After all, rank checking is, at least in my mind, not one of the most valuable SEO tasks you can pursue. You're not going to get higher rankings by checking them constantly. The best you can do is perhaps measure progress from an optimization or link building campaign, but wouldn't that time be better spent doing more to boost results?

There's a striking resemblance to electoral poll addiction - a fairly common phenomenon (according to articles like this one) wherein folks concerned about the election stay glued to the TV or Internet, consuming news in the vain hope of calming their nerves. You can't change much by watching the polls every day (or hour), yet I have to admit that along with my daily dose of SEO Book, Search Engine Journal & SELand, I'm on Memeorandum & Electoral-Vote almost every morning.

Thankfully, it's all over (barring a repeat of 2000) tomorrow night, and I strongly suspect productivity in offices across the country will quickly recover. But the question of why we're so concerned with constant data collection remains.

Luckily, this afternoon, lightning struck. Mystery Guest and I were attending a baby shower for some friends and since it was Sunday (and the TV in the room was broken), there was a flurry of mobile web activity so those of us addicted to the NFL could follow the scores. I couldn't help but draw the parallel - NFL scores, election news, search rankings - they all share a common thread - vested interest.

In each scenario, we care about what happens, and we're anxious, sometimes to the point of nervousness, for the results to be revealed. This vested interest means a demand for information, even when we can't affect the outcome (though I suppose it's possible that pulling up ESPN's box scores somehow caused another Eagles sack on poor Seneca Wallace). Maybe it's just human nature to shore up anxiety with data. Maybe this shouldn't be any surprise at all. Maybe this is exactly how we cope with uncertainty - whether it's in the keyword rankings that could bring traffic to our site or elections bringing change to our politics or, most important of all (insert tongue into cheek), whether the home team wins.

Of course, all this desperate need for data made me think that perhaps, it's time for us to upgrade the rank checker into a rank tracker - one that can automatically follow and collect this data to help save some of that  time and effort. Of course, there are a lot of programs, websites and tools out there to keep track of search results, so I thought I'd ask two questions:

1. Would you like to see SEOmoz offer automated rank tracking?
2. What are your favorite tools/services that currently provide this feature and what do you like/dislike about them?

Now to get my election news fix one more time...

p.s. I've railed against rank tracking in the past, though some smart folks argued that valuable data can be found through the process.