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!
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