Sent you a message. Seems a lot of Market Samurai rivals have been very active with comments this past week! Look forward to testing your solution.

I came across this and thought it would be worth commenting.

I’m sure you know a lot of MS customers have been experiencing issues with key word ranking checks.

There are some other solid platforms out there; online tools would probably be best as you don’t have to worry about your proxy servers. Analytics SEO, Raven, SEOMoz and WebCEO are a few examples.

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Regards

Tim

Perhaps the main point of the article fits with what you are saying. They did not consider the risks of relying on Google and thus as you say, perhaps did not collect data in the right way.

If you would like me to review you products personally, let me know.

Even though you are basically right about diversifying risks and ‘never putting all your eggs in one basket’, in the case of MS, what they did wrong was NOT choosing to rely on Google (IMHO), but choosing to collect Google’s data in a way that was risky from the very beginning.

I think no sane SEO can consciously choose not to deal with Google nowadays. Say, you are an SEO consultant from France, where Google accounts for over 90% of all the searches. Most likely, your clients would want to optimize for Google. And, most likely, you’d need a tool to run rankings reports for hundreds of keywords investing minimum time.

So, instead of trying to avoid dealing with Google (which is, like I said, not an option) every SEO software provider needs to create a solid architectural base for their tools BEFORE they launch them – the one that will stand even if search engines change their ways.

[Your links were removed as no linking/self promotion in main comments allowed = backlink still intact]

One should always think of the risks in any business and Google+ risks are quite large. I researched a few of my links in Google that were gaining me considerable traffic (being logged in to Google at the same time). One such term happened to be on page 1 for my chosen keyword and was netting me a handful of search engine referrals an hour. The moment I clicked my own link (don’t ask me why i did that), my site immediately dropped over 3 pages on the ranking. IMMEDIATELY.

The traffic for that search term also disappeared instantly. Google used my own information against me. It did not judge me on my content, rather it judged me on other metrics that had nothing to do with how well the extremely low bounce rate or popularity of the page. That sucks and is exactly what is happening with Google+.

As for Market Samurai – I’m receiving a lot of private messages from people telling me the issue has been around for weeks before they admitted it. Somewhere along the line things have gone wrong and perhaps not handled as honestly as we are led to believe.

My comments on their page got deleted yesterday which is interesting. I simply asked if the software isn’t working and they are making urgent changes, then why are they selling the product as originally advertised? Fair question I would believe, and something I know people close to me are annoyed about as they paid money for a product that MS knew wasn’t working right.

This will definitely be an interesting story to watch.