Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

It seems that Google could have banned the keyword visibility tool Web Position Gold (owned by WebTrends) from automatically querying its database for natural and paid search positions.  The block seems to have occured on August 1st 2008.

Google specifically states on the webmaster guidelines section of its website that tools of this sort are not allowed and it specifically singles out WebPosition Gold.

Moreover, with the advent of “Personalised Search”, the results from these tools were beggining to display a fairly inacuurate picture.

For companies who want to prove results to their clients, I’ve discussed a few in this blog post about SEO KPIS. 

Here are a few of the discussions about Google’s ban of Web Position Gold:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3716136.htm

http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/58243-webposition-google-block.html

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=133156

Scott GoodYear, a representative from WebPosition Gold has joined these discussions and confirmed that there is no official ban on the software but that Google has tweaked its HTML code which casued the previous scraping template to return no results.

This could very well be the case and I personally applaud Scott’s efforts to keep clients aware of the situation.  However I hope that this doesn’t take too long!

Google announced the release of Google insights for Search which provides more insight into  search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches.

The tool also allows for comparison of search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

This is a great tool to use to give an added dimension to your keyword research!