Has Google Blocked WebPosition Ranking Software for Good?

“Thanks for the news – this has certainly been an onging saga. Google has long been clear that they don't want to see automated rank checking, so it's not a surprise.

Given that they sometimes serve bad data to automated PR checkers, I'm actually surpirsed they didn't just start poisoning the ranking data, too. I guess that would be too much bandwidth, though.”

“can anyone tell why Google doesn't have an official rank checking tool… added to their webmaster tools for example? no, seriously. they're driving a lot of traffic through organic search, and results of their pages are in direct relation to both the income of websites and web search ad campaigns. it's not like Google doesn't have an interest in BigCompany not setting up AdWords campaigns for keywords they already rank top 3 for on organic. It's a legitimate question, and not some 'SEO trick' to see where a website is ranked at. Not only is it necessary in SEM ( although which process any SEO can script / do manually anyway ) but also it's a matter of transparency.”

“but what about the wmt tools, I've found them rather accurate,I just wish they'd go back to the 1 week data thing. ok , you can't determine which phrase you're checking. But bye the way guess who has such a tool,,,,,, live.com ”

“We are switching ranking tools. I would rather not report on ranking and just report on traffic – but reporting on traffic under specific keywords requires access and trust in a client's traffic analysis package. Some of the information now available on Google insights will help but it isn't something that as easily digestible by client executives.”

“And WMT gives the authenticated site owner access to that ranking data for their own website. That's quite a different proposition than publicly offering ranking data to anyone for any website. Ranking reports for one site are one thing, but offering to help reverse engineer the algorithm (or at least key parts) is another.”

“Just throwing this out there but I wonder if Google's recent transition to a more customized search result experience (dated 7/30) had anything to do with this, unintentional or not.”