Keyword Difficulty Tool
-
Hi,
When can we expect the keyword difficulty tool to be operational again?
Thanks
-
I love reading these in-depth answers from the CEO of Moz. It's so nice to see a hands-on CEO taking time to deal with even more mundane things like discussions around support issues.
-
Danny - see my responses above to your questions.
-
Permission is different than an API, IMO. Does Google have "permission" to crawl all of the world's websites and serve advertising alongside the results? No. But it's also not illegal or explicitly against those sites' terms (and they can opt out by keeping info behind a registration wall or robots.txt).
Everyone who collects rankings data - us, Raven, AuthorityLabs, Searchmetrics, Conductor, Covario, etc, etc. - does so in the same fashion. There's no special deals or APIs with search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu - any of 'em). Anyone showing rankings data is transparent about this simply be virtue of having it.
Sadly, I do agree that nothing we do here will ever be 100% reliable - it's a tough problem, but we believe it's one worth fighting for. This information deserves to be in the hands of marketers, and we're willing to work hard on their behalf to get it (just like our competitors and colleagues in the space do).
In terms of the bet - I'll be happy to just take the losing side now and donate to Movember Will send $99 when I'm back online later today!
In terms of "The degree to which my use account usage has been affected is an irrelevance. A chunk of the $99 you receive every month from me includes the use of tools that are reliant on ranking data to function. By not issuing automatic refunds to all pro users you are simply charging money for a service that was not available."We're more than happy to issue you a full refund, but you and I disagree on the issue of automatically refunding users who didn't use the tools or for whom the service didn't break. I'm happy to chat about that more offline - you can feel free to email me at rand@seomoz.org
-
Hi Rand
It's good to finally have an honest explanation for why these tools have been so unreliable. To the best of my knowledge it has never been made clear anywhere on this website that ranking data is reproduced without the permission of Google. With this in mind, it's little wonder that these tools are so flaky.
The fact remains that you are charging for a service that you are often unable to deliver. I shouldn't have to spend my time drafting emails to your support department requesting a refund every time these tools go down.
If your aim was to be truly transparent, you would make a full declaration on the site along the lines of, "SEOmoz Tools that use ranking data do so without the permission of the search engines concerned. As a result these tools are liable to frequent downtime. Please consider this fact when signing up for a pro account as the availability of these services cannot be guaranteed". At least then users could make an informed decision as to whether to use SEOmoz tools over a competitors'.
The degree to which my use account usage has been affected is an irrelevance. A chunk of the $99 you receive every month from me includes the use of tools that are reliant on ranking data to function. By not issuing automatic refunds to all pro users you are simply charging money for a service that was not available.
Until such a time that you have the full co-operation of Google to collect this data through a licensed API, I really can't see that there is ANYTHING your tech guys could do to make these features 100% reliable. The fact is, that SEOmoz is a service that is, and probably always will be, built on technically shaky foundations.
How about a $99 bet on whether the Keyword Difficulty tool stays fully functional to the end of 2012? The loser donates the money to your Movember charity. You game?
Danny
-
Hi Danny - sorry for my delay. Been a very busy week. You asked:
"Can you please confirm for me the exact reason why the Google ranking data and the Google search volume data in KDT has always been so unreliable."
Yes, I can. What we do is adversarial analytics data. The source of data (the search engines) are not stable providers on information with SLAs and promises and deals. In fact, they are constantly changing and in some cases working actively to prevent the collection of this data. Hence, our attempts to gather this information are sometimes thwarted, as they were this past week. You can see rankings data instability in virtually every other product/software/tool that tries to collect this type of data as well (a continuing problem for all of us in this field over the past 9 years - since Google stopped providing a rankings API).
We currently have a primary system, an early warning alert system, and a backup system. Last week, we lost our primary system, our early warning system alerted us, and we moved to the backup, which had some instability and some trouble catching up to the volumes needed, but eventually did so. I believe 95% of campaign rankings were caught up as of yesterday, and it should be 100% today.
I certainly apologize for the downtime - it sucks and I want to do better. We're building a third and fourth backup system (they were actually already in the sprint for the production engineering team this month, but had to be pushed back to deal with this emergency), and we hope that will help make things more stable in the future. However, until and unless there's an API with a true guarantee, this data's reliability will always be in question.
You also asked about refunds. We always want to be very generous with our refund policy - if your account and usage has been severely impacted by this outage, please write to our help team and we will issue a refund. However, we treat refunds individually, not on the overall level, for temporary outages of individual features.
For many folks, rankings data was on time (as I noted, only a percentage of rankings collections fell behind thanks to the backup). And ~25% of our users will use the keyword difficulty tool in a month (that tool was back up and operational earlier this week, and had less downtime that some of the campaign rankings).
If PRO went down entirely, or if a tool like Open Site Explorer (used by 70%+ of members monthly) was down for a long period, I think we'd need to re-examine the individual-based refund policy, but I'm hoping it never comes to that. The worst we've had so far was a period in September where several services were throwing frequent errors and issues.
I can tell you that over the next 3 months, uptime and reliability is a HUGE focus. The production engineering team has 4 fulltime engineers, 2 contractors, and 2 open full time positions. These folks do nothing but worry about our backups and how to make sure customers get data.
Thanks for sticking by us in tough times, and if you'd like a refund, please do email help@seomoz.org.
-
Hi Peter
I appreciate you providing a full and detailed response but I cannot accept your explanation.
Users being automatically compensated should have nothing to do with how much they are affected by an issue. A big chunk of the $99 fee that you charge every month is for the provision of ranking data. That data is crucial to the both campaign ranking reports and the Keyword Difficulty Tool. If those services were never available, SEOmoz would look pretty poor value and would struggle to charge $99 per month. Charging users a fee, for features they cannot use, regardless of whether or not they actually need that feature, is far from being fair and ethical.
Imagine a situation in which your cell phone operator was unable to provide you with a mobile data service for several months. You could still make calls and send text messages but you couldn't browse the web or send emails. Whether or not you personally needed to use mobile data in those 3 months has nothing to do with the fact that you will have been paying for a service that you could not have used. After all, you could have been on a phone package that included no data and saved yourself several dollars every month!
It is for this reason that this issue should not be handled on a case by case basis. Every pro user has been getting less than they have paid for and should be compensated accordingly. This should be irrespective of whether they use ranking data or have made a complaint.
Can you please confirm for me the exact reason why the Google ranking data and the Google search volume data in KDT has always been so unreliable. This is not a temporary glitch; it has been going on for years! If you are pulling this data from Google's API; is it that the API doesn't function correctly? Or is SEOmoz scraping data from Google web pages without a contractual agreement with Google to do so?
Danny
From: Peter [mailto:notifications-support@seomoz.zendesk.com]
Sent: 01 December 2012 02:19
To: Danny
Subject: [SEOmoz Help] Re: RE: [SEOmoz Help] Re: Credit|
| |
Peter (SEOmoz Help)
Nov 30 06:19 pm (PST)
Danny,
I am happy our tools are back up too! I'm sorry we have dampened your confidence in our services, we hope to gain that back in the future with more service uptime, better and more robust services, and of course better customer experience!
Regarding mass crediting to customers, I think I can answer your questions in a short way that doesn't cause any confusions. The reason we look at customer issue on a case by case basis is because that is exactly how it sounds, the only way to solve customer issues is to physically talk to and solve every unique problem that our customers are facing. While the last week has been tough as a fair number number of problem have been about KWD and Rankings. I think you would be surprised to know that not everyone have the same problems, as SEOmoz PRO have a pretty diverse set of tools that fits a wide audience of SEO consultants which utilizes the suite rather than just one tool (or two in last week's case). The only way we know which specific problem they have is by our users reporting it on the Help@SEOmoz.org, we have tools that allows us to effectively answer and keep track of the issues and come up with unique resolutions, which can include credits/refund which we happily provide if it warrants the situation. While mass refund strategy might be one way to handle issues in your opinion, I believe it is generally not the way we should do business because it is neither generous or authentic. When our users come to us with an issue (which we have no way to know unless they report it), they want more than a credit/refund. I feel like finding ways to provide solutions that are unique to their situation is often time more generous (value-added), transparant and authentic because we admit our limitations to our customers quite freely if that is something we did wrong, we provide solutions that are Unique to their issues and we in turn take those feedback and improve our processess which pays dividends in the future of the product.
I hope this is helpful in letting you know some more of my thoughts, I think it is healthy to disagree on something, I am sorry we lost some of your confidence in our service with last week's outage, we will work hard to try to earn back not only your confidence.
Regards,
Peter|
|
-
I'm glad to see that KDT is up and running but this tool has never been stable. It has got to the point where we cannot ever rely on it to work. I have very little confidence that these problems will not re-occur.
I have repeatedly asked the question why users are not automatically compensated when such a vital part of the service is not available for extended periods of time. All I get are glib replies such as this one from Peter, "I think when it comes to finding a to compensation plans for our customers in a time like this, it is hard to just come up to a standard convention when it comes to compensating our customers for their time. We usually take care of all of our user issues on a case by case basis".
The only "hard" thing about giving compensation to users is that losing some of your profits hurts your bottom line. There is nothing technically difficult about saying "We will rebate users for every day that our tools are down". If you can do it for me, you can it for everyone!
The truth is that compensating only users who complain costs SEOmoz less money. By insisting that this is handled on a case by case basis, what you are really saying is "We are happy to charge users for a service that they have not received".
Which part of TAGFEE does this sound like? It is neither Transparent, Authentic or Generous. Perhaps your famous acronym should be changed to just FEE. This would more accurately reflect SEOmoz's current attitude to its users. Do the right thing here guys!
-
Hi all. Here's a quick update. The good news is that we tracked down the core issues and have made progress toward fixing them. Keyword difficulty is up and running again, although we are still testing and tracking down a few imperfect results. Campaign rankings are in good shape. If you had any missing rankings, they should be retrieved by late tonight, though there a very small set of locales for which rankings are not yet available. And we are still on target to have rank tracker working tomorrow.
I also wanted to note that the engineering team has been investing in building up redundancy to ensure greater resiliency in the future. Unfortunately these systems were not yet complete when the latest problems arose. Fortunately, a lot of the work that the team has put in over the last week has helped us better test and prepare those systems.
Thanks to everyone for your patience during this outage. We don't take these issues lightly and have put every available resource toward solving them. We’re truly sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.
-
Hi everyone,
We've just updated the Known Issues page and I wanted to reiterate what Nick said over there:
Hey everyone! Some good news from our engineers.
- Keyword Difficulty is back up for Google.
- Rankings are in good condition. We have identified and are in the process of fixing the calendar icon issue. Most campaigns should be fixed late tonight. However, some locales are not available yet.
- Rank Tracker is still a little sick, but we hope to have it up soon.
Thanks for the patience everyone.- Nick
-
I have been told it will be fixed by Friday which is tomorrow.
I asked seomoz on twitter and included the CEO in it.
-
Hi Peter
Thanks for your response
You say, "we believe by providing our users with credits (often multiple months), we think that is the best way to make up for the time that our service is not working".
Your statement seems disingenuous as you a) make me no offer of compensation of multiple months and b) make no offer to other pro users unless they complain and demand compensation. Why would you not compensate all users who are not getting the service that they have paid for?
If your tools are simply scraping content from Google SERPS, then they are bound to go down every time Google decides to change the format of the page. If you don't have access to a Google API these issues are going to keep cropping up with no long term solution in sight.
So, I will ask again...
-
How will I be compensated?
-
How will you compensate all pro users? (Including those that don't complain)
-
How will this issue be fixed in the long term so that it does not keep reoccurring
I don't need your platitudes about how great I am. I just need simple, straight answers from an organisation that claims to be transparent and ethical
Danny
From: Peter [mailto:notifications-support@seomoz.zendesk.com]
Sent: 29 November 2012 17:59
To: Danny
Subject: [SEOmoz Help] Re: RE: [SEOmoz Help] Re: Credit|
| |
Peter (SEOmoz Help)
Nov 29 09:59 am (PST)
Hello Danny,
Thank you for your honest and critical feedback, I want to thank you for being forward on your feelings about our service. It is passionate user like you that keeps us to constantly improve ourselves. Regarding the recently rankings issue, we can understand that when you rely on a service as much as we rely on google for our service, sometimes when problem arises how that can impede or sometimes stop your operations. In terms of our upfront we are with our customers, we consistently update our users our known problems forum, our blog, and twitter @SEOmoz.
Regarding the compensating our users, we believe by providing our users with credits (often multiple months), we think that is the best way to make up for the time that our service is not working. The other form of compensation is obviously our commitment to properly predict and create fire drills for this kind of release from Google in the future (which we learned our lesson from this time). You can read about it here in a great Public post by our CTO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/biting-the-bullet-of-technical-debt.
I want to both thank you for being a valued user/customer/mozzer and I do apologize for the troubles that you and the community have experience this holiday season.
Warm regards,
Peter Li
SEOmoz Help team.P,S. I will keep this ticket in my queue so I can keep you updated.
|
|
-
-
**The constant stream of excuses may be more believable if this tool has ever been reliable!
If the the ongoing issues with this tool are due to Google's API then you have got to either find a workable LONG TERM solution or charge separately for this tool on the rare occasions on which it does work.
A tool that works half the time is worse than no tool at all
When will SEOmoz be compensating all Pro users? **
-
If your customer services team was truly being "generous", you would be automatically compensating all pro users for a service that consistently fails to work. Instead you ask people to contact you privately and refund only those that shout the loudest.
I thought SEOmoz was supposed to be better than this? What happened to to the TA in TAGFEE? You may need to change this to FEG!
-
Yes, please soon. I'm in my trial period and I like what I see but this hasn't worked once for me since I signed up. I'm hoping this is not the norm--doesn't seem that way b/c the seomoz reputation is great.
-
Hi everyone,
I just wanted to chime in and let you know we are hard at work trying to get this going.
The change in Google's processes took us as much by surprise as it did everyone else. I really appreciate your understand and patience while we get this fixed.
Cheers,
Joel. -
Thank you for the update but it doesn't bode well considering its one of the core features of SEoMoz Pro.
-
Hi! This link will give you information about the Keyword Difficulty tool. We'll keep it updated, as well as our Twitter feed. https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/22457872-keyword-difficulty-and-rank-tracker-issues
-
In my experience, there isn't anything that remotely compares to it. SEOMoz, you have a great tool that we want to use. When will this be fixed?
-
I agree this needs to be sorted once and for all as this is getting ridiculous.
Does anyone know a decent alternative to this tool?
-
This needs to be fixed asap. I haven't been able to use it in a week and my clients are not happy!
-
The Keyword Difficulty tool is currently unresponsive due to difficulties with real-time rankings retrievals. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to fix it.
I have been getting this message for the last week.
This tool is the most important tool i use with seomoz subscription.
Roger fix the problem!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage not ranking main keywords - structure error?
Dear, Moz community We have an issue. We have a classified advertisement website. Our website is built like this**homepage (**Optimized for main keyword, has latest listings from all categories ) - category 1 (we did not want to add alteration of the keyword we want to rank homepage, as we thought this would "compete" with homepage) - category 2 - category 3 - **category **4 The listing URLs look like this www.example.com/categoryname/listingname Now the issue is that the homepage is not ranking at all for the main keywords. When we used URL structure like this "example.com/main-keyword-listing-id" homepage was ranking (other sites). Now with new site we used the best practice and added url's as described above (/categoryname/listingid).This caused our homepage not to rank at all for the main keywords.What did we do wrong? We want our homepage to rank for the main keyword and categories for theirs. Should we 1. Change the category 1 name to main keyword (maybe some long tail) so we have the main keyword in URLs? So at least one of the main categories has the main keyword in the listing URLs2. Should we change the category listing urls all back to /main-keyword-listing-id? We thought that this was a bit spammy, so that´s why we used categories. _This means that all listings have same URL name and not best for ranking cateogries_3. Just link back to homepage internally with the main keyword and google should catch that? _Currently in menu you go to homepage clicking HOME but we can add for example our main keyword there - Latest car advertisements _I would be happy of any feedback.
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Meta keywords shown in Google SERPS as site description
I'm seeing Google display meta-keywords in the SERP description for some sites (at least a half dozen that I've checked). I BELIEVE IT IS AN AJAX ISSUE BECAUSE: The sites all use AJAX to display content. So the meta-keywords are in the header, and the javascript that displays the content. Non-AJAX parts of the site display properly in Google SERPS The meta-keywords don't visibly appear anywhere on the page. When I turn off images and Javascript in Chrome I don't see any hidden keyword text. I BELIEVE IT IS A GOOGLE-SPECIFIC ISSUE BECAUSE: Each site displays properly in Bing and Yahoo SERPS - the meta-description is the description. However, (as expected) I see the same strange meta-keyword activity in Aol search In Screaming Frog's SERP preview I see the meta-description as the description. Google has been ignoring met-keywords for years. Any idea why it's appearing in the SERPS for these AJAX powered sites? I found one other person who saw that Google may be reading and displaying their content in AJAX even though that content is meant to appear on a different "page". No one on that Google Forum seemed to understand the person's problem. The only reason I get it is because now I'm seeing it with my own eyes. I know the Moz community can do better, so i'm posting about it here.
Technical SEO | | AlexCobb0 -
Migrating to New site keywords question
We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products. In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF). I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches. For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page. Question: in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords? I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.
Technical SEO | | ssaltman0 -
Penalty on two primary keywords
Hi Seomoz, I have been strugling to get www.texaspoker.dk out of what seems to be a keyword specific penalty (we are on page 5 on "poker" and "online poker"). First I thought it was Penguin related, but I'm not so sure any longer. I have removed all the bad links to my site possible (it's not easy to get other people to remove links, I can tell you), and I have reported all the links that I would like google to "ignore" (reconsideration request) ... all in all I have requested for reconsideration 5 times, and - despite some small changes - I got the same answer every time. We violate the quality guide lines and we should be looking for unnatural links pointing to our site. If any one - by having a look at our site - have any idea what could be wrong, please don't hold back, we would love to hear your point of view. Right now we are in the middle of making our partners take off their site wide links to us (the partners you'll find if you click the flags to the right in the top of the home page). On Texaspoker.dk we only link to the partners from the home page, but maybe we should consider to take of even these links? No one is really clicking on them anyway. Another thing, which is only under consideration, is to ask our partners from Betxpert.com (with whom we have exchanged our news feed - you will find their feed if you schroll down the home page) to set the feed to "no follow" and do the same our selves. What do you think of this thought? As far as I can see, there is nothing wrong with the on page optimization, but maybe some one can see what I don't see? Again - what ever thoughts you guys may have - shoot ... i'm ready to take all bulets 🙂 Thanks in advance! Nicolai, Texaspoker.dk
Technical SEO | | MPO0 -
Sudden drop in Google with our top performing keywords
Hi, I'm writing about the sudden drop in our keyword rankings from our site www.activitybreaks.com. Our keywords that have significantly seen a drop have been activity holidays was 8th now 16th Adventure holidays was 15th now 71st We have been listed on the first page for a number of keywords but these has suddenly dropped in the last couple of days. We did receive a notice on the 19th May from Google stating that they detected unnatural links. So we spent a couple of weeks getting the links removed and have re-submitted the site on 11th June. When I go into Google webmaster there is no reply from Google as yet and the links are still showing even though we know they have been removed. We also noticed in the last couple of days that we had a duplicate home page but this has now since been removed. Should we re-submit our site to Google for reconsideration or wait to they get back to us. Is there anything else we can be doing to fix this situation. Let me know if you have any ideas! Anything is appreciated, thanks. Naomi
Technical SEO | | activitybreaks50 -
A keyword suddenly dropping 25 positions in Gooogle
Hello, One of my clients have a new website (just 3 months old) and for some keywords it's already working quite well (some of them already on first page for organic search results in Google). But suddenly one of the keywords (just one) dropped 25 positions from one day to another, while the rest of them are ok and even getting better. What may be happening here? The only thing I have done for this keyword different to the rest is that I have created a few internal links (just 7 o 😎 using the keyword. The site is big, with around 60 pages including a blog. I know that I'm not being very explicit with the information I'm providing... Thank you in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
Is this keyword strategy totally wrong?
I have a Driving School website www.1stclassdriving.co.uk. The site is structured geographically with one page per Area
Technical SEO | | Brian_Worger
(post code) and one page per Driving Instructor. There are links from each Area page to the instructors
working in the Area. The principal search keyword that I want to optimise on is
"Driving Lessons" The thinking was to target each individual Area page for
"Driving lessons in xxx" where xxx is the particular geographic area
and each particular Instructor to "Driving Lessons in yyy" where yyy
is the main town . The ideal would be that a search on "Driving
Lessons" would pick up the root page - search on an area, say "Driving
Lessons in Croydon" would pick up the Croydon area page and a search on a
town, say "Driving lessons in Mitcham" would pick up the Instructor
that covered that town page. However having read Rebeccas Keyword research guide I am
concerned that this strategy is wrong because of the volume of pages that use
"Driving Lessons in xxxx". Does this fall foul of "Keyword cannibalization" ?
and if so what is the best way of being able to achieve our objective?0 -
Would this be considered keyword cannabalization?
If I have an article, titled 7 signs of unhealthy eating and the title tag for five different pages looks like this: keyword | article title ex: Binge Eating | 7 Signs of Unhealthy Eating ex: Lack of Fruits & Vegetables | 7 Signs of Unhealthy Eating etc, etc.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0