tedster - 11:51 pm on Aug 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

As you might imagine, Webmaster World also has its major struggles with bots and scrapers. As some may remember, we even banned all bots, including search engines, for a while at one point. So we have at least an inkling of the problem that must be scaled up enormously for Google.

Where is the middle ground? What can meet the needs of webmasters and the companies they hire?

Perhaps at least some enhancements to Webmaster Tools - DEPENDABLE enhancements, please - would be a good development. I rarely use automated rank checking, but when I do it's usually for analysis of important traffic anomalies.

Given the complexity of today's SERPs worldwide, something like average position of major search terms would be good. And a heads up report on dramatic position shifts would be dynamite. Hey, a guy can dream, right?

Maybe an "impressions" report, rather than a ranking report would be a possibility.