WebPosition Ranking Software Being Blocked by Google?

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News Source: http://www.seroundtable.com
Published: Aug 07, 2008 - 12:49 am
Story Found By: ThirstyPony 1387 Days ago
Category: SEO

WebCEO, WebPositionGold and other automated rank reporting software may be going the way of the Dodo.

30 Comments

Comments

from ThirstyPony 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 1

A colleague of mine got around this while running monthly client reports yesterday by changing a "few things" - but that seems like a bandaid solution to me. Will we have to do this every month or every time we wish to quickly scan or check up on a personal project (which I’ve been known to do daily)?Methinks this could be very bad.

from Guillaume 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 0

WebCEO has been a nightmare for us lately. We are thinking to switch to RankSense, which is much smarter / useful and was built by someone who understands SEO.

from BrianChappell 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Yea, WebCeo does not work. Blocked by Big Brother.

from incrediblehelp 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 0

AWR works fine.

from Jill 1387 Days ago #

Votes: -3

...may be going the way of the Dodo.As they should. Why are you people still checking rankings?

from HamletBatista 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 1

Guillaume - It was great meeting you last week :-) As you know, we (RankSense) don’t need to query Google to check rankings so we will never get blocked ;-)@Jill Hi, checking rankings is useful if you want to make sure you best performing keywords are in the first page of results and not several pages down ;-)

from Jill 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 1

@Jill Hi, checking rankings is useful if you want to make sure you best performing keywords are in the first page of results and not several pages down ;-)No, actually checking rankings aren’t good for that since what any 2 or more people see as the rankings will be different at any given time, and any given place.

from HamletBatista 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 5

No, actually checking rankings aren’t good for that since what any 2 or more people see as the rankings will be different at any given time, and any given place. You are partially right. Let’s dive a little bit deeper on this topic. Rankings can vary based on several different factors: Physical location/geotargetingBrowser language configurationNumber of results selection (i.e: 10, 20, 100, etc.)DatacentersType of search queryRanking algorithms tests (when search engines experiment with new algos)Search engine country domain (i.e: .uk, .au, etc.)Etc. First of all, some queries never change no matter what. One example of this is navigational/brand searches. They [always] return the URL of the site. Do a search for "sphinn", "sphinn.com" or http://sphinn.com and you will get the same results. Brand searches are very important in many markets. For example, the search for "viagra" always returns "viagra.com" as the first result. You can add the localization parameters to your Google searches to test many different locations and confirm this: “&gl=US”, “&gr=US-CA”, “&gcs=San%20Francisco” In my experience most rankings fluctuate based on the physical location of the searcher and it is very easy for a passive rank checking tool (that does traffic analysis instead of pooling search engines) to use the IP of the requestor to identify his or her location and group the rankings based on that information. At the end of the day, the most profitable traffic (traffic that converts) comes from a specific set of regions, so it is wise to make sure we are listed prominently when people search for us from those regions. For example, let say that people looking for “running shoes” from “San Francisco, CA”. They see our site on page 4, but people from “Ontario, CA” see the site on page one; but our PPC data and analytics show that we don’t make any sales from “SF, CA” but we do make good sales from Canada, we want to make anything possible to improve our listings for Canada users. Maybe even use Google webmaster tools to set that country as our preferred location. BTW, I completely agree that rankings are not the best measure of success of an SEO campaign, IMO traffic and conversions are the best metric. But is hard to think that getting listed on page one for your most profitable keywords (in your most profitable regions) is not a useful goal. Cheers

from HamletBatista 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 0

from jaypaul 1387 Days ago #

Votes: 1

same here about Webceo, Webceo has done very good marketing to Promote their software but unfortunately not working from my side , it is Blocked by G.But i think, SEODigger.com is also FREE and best to check currecnt Rankings. peoples are very interested in these type software who can help to check accurate rankings in Google, I like seodigger and Rankchecker of seobook.com and you can add extension of rankchecker with lovely firefox browser.ThanksJay

from discuit 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 0

We use Web CEO, and on Monday it was an utter nightmare, nothing working with Google. Seems to have settled down now. Using the settings on the slowest possible

from Jill 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 1

You guys are not only checking rankings (which is silly) but also using automated software that doesn’t use Google’s API? Good luck not having your client’s website’s removed all together from Google. It’s not out of the realm of possibility as they’ve done it in the past. I thought everyone knew to use Google’s API if they were still using old fashioned measurements such as automated rank checking.And Hamlet, you forgot about personalized search as well. You can’t get the general public to turn that off, so you have no idea what they’re actually seeing in the SERPs.

from HamletBatista 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 1

And Hamlet, you forgot about personalized search as well. You can’t get the general public to turn that off, so you have no idea what they’re actually seeing in the SERPs.LOL. That is why I included "Etc.". I knew I was forgeting something :-). That is a very good point.Please note that not all search results need to be/are personalized. Similar to my example with the navigational searches, users’ intent can determine wether their results need personalization or not.Here is an interesting research paper that talks in depth about that topic. Here is a quote:For some queries, everyone who issues the query is looking for the same thing. For other queries, different people want very different results even though they express their need in the same wayI personaly think traditional rank checkers have many limitations in the current landscape, but traffic analysis based rank "discovery" can help you identify many search opportunities you would be missing otherwise.BTW, Google discontinued support to their search api a couple of years ago. I don’t even know if our tokens are still valid. I perfer to rely on traffic logs.

from Jill 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 0

The old existing API keys do still work for stuff. I use mine for various apps (not rank checking!). Offtopic, but anyone know why they discontinued them? Seems like they’re encouraging people to hammer their regular databases now. At least when there was an alternative, there was no excuse not to use the API database (other than the fact that it’s not showing the same results as their main databases of course).

from HamletBatista 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 0

@Jill It seems they prefer researchers use it to improve/experiment with search algorithms rather than SEOs mining for gold :-)They introduced an alternative last year. Here is my post about it:http://hamletbatista.com/2007/08/09/google-brings-back-the-search-api-sort-of/

from NickWilsdon 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Yep, the AJAX API replacement didn’t seem to do the same job with returning SERP info you could parse for your own systems. That’s why people were going back to screenscraping the results. That’s easy enough to do as long as you put in a few routines to randomise the requests. I just went to have a read up on the current situation and it seems they released a REST API earlier this year which may do the job again. It "returns a JSON object, which you can parse for titles, URLs, and short blurbs."http://blog.programmableweb.com/2008/04/21/googles-rest-api-for-search/Anyone using this for getting SERP results?

from webmama 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 2

My response to comments that people can’t believe that we are still doing ranking reports. Bottom Line: Give the client what they want. Multi-billion dollars companies don’t change status quo easily.http://blog.webmama.com/2008/08/ranking-reports-still-necessity-of.html"I knew that I would get the ’I can’t believe they still run ranking reports’ comment. You are right, I am not so behind the times and am very, very clear with clients that it is NOT the measurement they should be using for tracking. That said: in order to track organic, video, or image download or whatever that is not a paid search or online click you need the cooperation of a whole different group in the company. Sophisticated clients have most web marketing run out of marketing organizations with marketing budgets - they don’t own IT or the traffic analysis packages. Some are using completely different systems to track marketing campaigns, of which search is a part, like marketfirst or eloqua. The in-house SEO people at these clients are in the marketing divisions now and we work with them. It is the sign of a mature company if SEO and Paid Search are all in marketing - but it creates other problems. The best way to track organic is to tag the visitor in some way but because it is not tracked say with a dart tag or a Google adwords tag, which can be set up by marketing people at the campaign level, this tracking requires ’help’ from a different division. Executives need something that is highly visible, isn’t just about numbers and shows improvement or problems readily - thus rankings. So, as we mature and move SEO away from the IT/developer crowd into the world of marketing campaigns we lose some of our ability to control the technical side of the business. I would rather it be part of marketing anyway. "

from incrediblehelp 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 0

@Jill"No, actually checking rankings aren’t good for that since what any 2 or more people see as the rankings will be different at any given time, and any given place."Well actually I rarely see rankings shift from datacenter to datacenter for the top tier keywords in positions 1-3. But I will agree running ranking reports are somewhat conter-productive as you only need to look in the log files to see what is truely happening.

from g1smd 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 1

*** peoples are very interested in these type software who can help to check accurate rankings in Google ***<div></div><div>There is no such thing as "accurate", as explained by several people above.</div><div></div><div></div><div>*** My response to comments that people can’t believe that we are still doing ranking reports. Bottom Line: Give the client what they want. ***</div><div></div><div>I prefer client education, rather than wasting time.</div>

from Jill 1386 Days ago #

Votes: 0

@Barbara, now that Google’s finally banned the tools, you’ll have a good excuse to tell your clients why you’re not doing ranking reports anymore.Good on Google...about time.Should make it easier for those like you who like to just "give the client what they want."

from tonynwright 1385 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Jill,I usually agree with you, but on this I don’t. I use (or used to use) Webposition Gold Reporter to create a baseline report for the client and for our own internal purposes. And we track those rankings once per month. Of course, this is in conjunction with analytics analysis and other progress measurements. But the bottom line is rankings are important. Personalization and IP targeting are not the point where there is significant differences in rankings on the majority of keywords, so rankings are still one of the best indicators of traffic. Plus the fact that a ranking is a TANGIBLE asset to a company, and sometimes it can help guide the overall marketing strategy. For instance, if I’ve done my keyword research and the client pushes for a keyword that we don’t recommend then sometimes I’ll just go ahead and optimize for that keyword and get it to rank. Once it ranks and pulls in absolutely no sales or leads, I prove I was right (or, unfortunately in a few cases, wrong). I need to check those rankings in order to prove to the client what’s working and what’s not. Yes, I could get that from analytics, but the point is simply that rankings are what clients understand. If Google Webmaster tools would provide us with average rankings for keywords we want to show up under (something I would imagine would be rather easy to implement) then I would be happy to pay for it. I want to know rankings AND how they integrate with traffic and sales. Thats the name of the game.

from johnandrews 1384 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Google’s blocking more than automated rank checkers... I don’t use them but I am pretty fast with the right-click/open-in-new-tab and Google’s been telling me I’m a bot lately. Sometimes just jumping to the 19th page of results triggers the block... and it doesn’t go away for too long a while.It’s stupid when restrictions like this block actual Google users. I am literally forced to go to Yahoo! because they can’t handle reality.

from g1smd 1384 Days ago #

Votes: 1

Try a search with both site: and inurl: parameters - you usually can’t make it past the second page.

from vanessafox 1382 Days ago #

Votes: 2

Automated rank checking tools have always been against Google’s guidelines:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769"Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."I’m with Jill on this one. One of the questions people ask me most often is how they can check their rankings, but I generally try to discourage them. I think rankings data is particularly useful for diagnosing issues (does the site rank for branded queries? did the page that used to rank highest for a particular query drop like a stone?), but in general, it’s a bad metric for performance. A much better indicator is search traffic over time.Is your search traffic for a particular query trending up or down? Not only can all the factors mentioned earlier in his thread cause rankings to vary by searcher, but #1 ranking may not produce the most traffic for the SERP anyway. If the title and description are poor or if a universal (image, video...) result is lower on the page, then your #1 ranking may be attracting less traffic than other results on the page. You have to look at your results holistically to improve overall traffic. After all, high rankings that don’t bring qualified traffic are pretty pointless.

from johnandrews 1379 Days ago #

Votes: 2

Vanessa didn’t address how Google is blocking us users as well, for very legitimate hand-entered queries.I find it odd that this new bahavior coincides with the announcement of Gogle’s insight trend reporting, which seems to be very sensitive to repeated queries for low volume searches. Google hates to look stupid. Blocking us might make them look stupid to us, but they can still look smart to the rest of the world. Let’s hope it is temporary. If Google decides to fake everything so as not to look stupid to the general public, we’ll have another Enron on our hands (yes, think about it... links: is fake, some of the other advanced queries are fake, this automated blocking warning is either stupid or fake, the claimed ties between Quality Scores and pricing appears to be fake, etc etc etc?)

from g1smd 1379 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Matt Cutts posted about this today too.http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3716136-5-20.htm

from MattCutts 1378 Days ago #

Votes: 0

johnandrews, interesting. In my experience, Yahoo has always had thresholds set to be more sensitive than Google. I’ve gotten the "999" error from Yahoo plenty of times in just regular searching.

from NickWilsdon 1378 Days ago #

Votes: 0

I agree with Ian and John on the sensitivity of the Google on advanced queries. I did wonder if Google were being particularly tough on Russian IPs so good to hear others have found the same. Even got it in regular searching from here.

from StepIntoTheLight 1372 Days ago #

Votes: 0

MattC/All,I believe there is a solution here. Google says in TOS (and I’m paraphrasing or course), to use their interface provided (aka, manually perform searches via google homepage). Now IPs are being blocked for specifically running automated rank checking software. This makes no sense to me. I don’t want to set my preferences to 50 or 100 results and manually check rank for 50 key phrases, it is grossly inefficient and backwards, but, in essence, that is what Google wants. If Google’s position is that it uses up too many resources OR perhaps that it doesn’t allow Google to serve up our ads to an actual user (aka support revenue stream; ) or some other monetary consideration, then simply charge for the access. I would pay Google for rank checking "access" or high resource units or whatever you want to call it. Even better yet, how about Google sells their own rank monitoring service?I’m not here to unduly tax Google resources, but it is important to me to have as much information and monitoring in place and there is significant marketing value to rank monitoring. And significant value to efficiency.So instead of IP blocking because of volume or identification of components of WPG or WEBCEO etc., creating ill-will among those that see value in monitoring information, just give us an option to pay for advanced volume "access" either directly via Google or work out a surcharge with WPG, webceo, etc.Why? Because rank monitoring is important. It establishes or verifies a cause/effect relationship in marketing, is clearly something that can be influenced, and often a change in rank of a few positions can reap great rewards making improved ranking a most worthy SEO goal.I’m also curious to those who say checking your rank is of no value, can you tell me that you never Google a key phrase to see where you are in the results? Never? Well if you do, even now and then, guess what, you’re rank checking and wasting time by doing it manually.

from hyperdog 1371 Days ago #

Votes: 0

I wonder if these queries mess with Google Insights? Has anyone seen "Breakout" volume on terms they are running reports for?

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