We know they've been trying to make it hard, but it feels a lot like they just upped their game.
Raventools have just announced that they won't be offering rank tracking. This comes just a few days after they announced that they would lose access to the Adwords API... then announced that wasn't happening. Interestingly, SEOmoz also announced the Adwords API issue in a similar way.
Wording around the raventools announcement ( http://raventools.com/blog/scraped-data-serp-tracker/ ) sounds to me like they haven't been left much choice (by google). Be interesting to see whether other tools follow suit.
Hmm... whilst we're here then: Recommendations for rank tracking tools?
I've been meaning to try out cuterank with a few proxies.
But with most things I've never got round to it.
But I've used serpfox through a friend of mine and I quite like it if you're wanting a cloud solution.
I'm the friend who recommends SERPFOX. It's pretty good and gives a broad range, I then check important ones manually. There is also Clicky which gives you the rank of each keyword someone used to find your site, as long as it wasn't a secure search.
I hear good things about microsite masters too but haven't used it a lot.
*thinks*
This isn't war on rank tracking. This is war on SEO's and Internet marketers in general.
1. They removed free keyword tools to do research (a long time ago, granted, but still)
2. They removed stats for search referrers for those "logged in" to their google profile.
3. Now they remove access for people to track their ranks automatically using rank checking tools.
They've learned that Matt Cutts doesn't have as much power with his threats anymore. They want to take us all down so all we can do is buy results.
Oh, and in the meantime they want to make everyone use their Webmaster Tools as you cannot sneeze anymore without having an account. Next they make that paid as well.
I wonder how a popular search engine optimisation community will spin this. :D
The war heated up when Page took over. I've said before, it seems like he has a major chip on his shoulder about people manipulating his perfect little baby which is Page Rank and is slowly trying to smash all manipulators (seo's) into the ground. Luckily for those who don't care about following some self righteous companies agenda, rankings are easier to achieve.
We use AWR for some small stuff, but it should be able to check pretty accurately if you run it through some proxies.
Does the job for us - even on local scale.
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