Forum Moderators: open
[edited by: crosenblum at 1:40 pm (utc) on April 24, 2003]
Does anyone have a site, or does anyone know of a site that has been penalised for checking rankings automatically?
Yes. Do a site search here for WPG penalties and I believe you will find what you are looking for. GoogleGuy has specifically stated that they penalized sites for using WPG. How they were able to determine that is yet to be told. I could only assume that those who do get penalized for using it, are severely abusing the program and Google's TOS.
Example...
SEO sells WPG from their website. SEO lists clients on website. SEO runs abusive queries for terms related to those clients. SEO even runs WPG on his own site. SEO is running queries from a static IP. Oh-oh...
There are other scenarios that could be painted. Bottom line, it is just not worth the risk. Many who purchase the program are not aware of the associated risks and therefore find themselves banned for some reason or the other.
You make a good point. I am a web developer and have written a web metrics application for the websites that I operate myself so I am in tune to what you are saying.
However, you really need to know your rank and you really need to rank well for your primary keywords. It is great to know WHERE your traffic is coming from and WHAT keywords are being used but you also have to know what keywords could potentially bring you more targeted traffic if you were to improve your ranking for said keywords.
IF NewKeywordRankd > OldKeywordRank THEN
NewTraffic > OldTraffic
End If
Hence, paying attention to your rankings cannot be ignored.
Most of the results I found in a sitesearch weren't very clear on this point. And I read an awful lot of posts where people claim they are banned for one thing or another (usually they blame competitors) when their own sites are clearly guilty of some other offence that has resulted in the penalty.
You're absolutely right, but why do you need Webposition Gold to check your rankings?
I'm still not understanding that....
Zuko
I do know that others here have replied in past discussions about this as a possibe reason why they were banned. I do know of one site that is currently trying to get back in via the reinclusion request. The site is clean and he can only attribute the ban to his heavy use of the rank checking feature.
Related discussions:
Why has my site been banned? [webmasterworld.com]
Google and position checking software [webmasterworld.com]
Will i be penalized for using it to submit my site to the SE
Always hand submit your pages. Auto-submitters are extremely poor and most search engines dislike them intensely. If you ask me, avoid them like the plague ;)
I recall a few discussions where someone came to the board and said their website was banned at Google. After numerous replies as to why it may have happened, GoogleGuy chimed in and asked if they were using WPG to check their rankings. Come to find out, that was the issue.
JohnC, I agree with you in regards to knowing where you rank. A few manual searches here and there using the clients primary keyword phrases are all that is needed. I say this in regards to my client base, not others. Again, if they are groomed to rely on statiscal analysis and not just knowing where they rank, then rank checking is not a factor anymore.
SirFroggZ...
Will i be penalized for using it to submit my site to the SE.
I'm not too certain there are many SE's left out there that you can do an automated submission to. Oh, there are plenty of smaller properties that you could submit to, but, I doubt very seriously you will see any traffic. Maybe a little bit of email spam to the address you used for the submissions.
I'd almost be willing to bet that a portion of the SE's that are listed in the submission list block the automated submission tools as they too find them abusive.
GoogleGuy [webmasterworld.com]
message #20
Let's say I check 10 sites every month in Google for 10 terms each. That's 1000 automated searches a month. Google claim 200 million a day. The effort it must take to track down, verify, and ban someone causes more hassle and expense problem it's trying to fix.
I've no doubt Google shut down people abusing the software on a large scale, but for the average webmaster wanting to check their rankings I see no problem. WPH has had more than 50,000 downloads from download.com alone. From what I can tell, you can check rankings in the demo and so most of the 50k will have done so. Is Google going to ban every single one of them, or even a high percentage?
I understand and agree with Google's stance on ranking checkers - they want real visitors, not automated queries (if not least for the impression count on adwords) but I think there's more bluff than substance in threats of banning. It probably puts a lot of people off, so it does its job.
hehe above post appeared while I was typing...
I don't need WPG to check my rankings. I am just trying to clarify how the SEs would know WHO to penalize for using ANY automated rank checking software.
Go out and nuke your competitors kids - it'll only cost you $150
and there I was thinking that WPG was good for nothing...
[edited by: pixel_juice at 8:07 pm (utc) on April 24, 2003]
>>Go out and nuke your competitors kids - it'll only cost you $150
I think this will only result in getting your IP blocked.
- And before anyone gets too mad, here is why -
... once you learn how to code sites and submit them yourself you realize how limiting these products really are. Until then you don't really know.
Sure, anyone can create a work of art with an off the shelf paint by numbers kit. Just as anyone can create a website by pointing and clicking with FrontPage. And if that is what you are happy with then by all means do it that way. But to become a true master you have to take the time and effort necessary to learn how to do these things yourself. Once you do, you are set free so to speak. You can then do FAR more than what those limiting Off the Shelf programs promise.
But you gotta put in the time and the sweat.
I couldn't tell you how Google detects and penalizes sites, I could speculate on how they accomplish this. If you're not convinced, I'm not going to try to convince you. I'm convinced by almost everyone here saying: "page ranking programs = bad". If you aren't convinced by webmasterworld, then best of luck to you. We've already heard a personal account of someone getting banned from using this software.
You could very possibly get away with it, but my whole point is.......why risk it? What's the point, when there are other methods just as easy and with no risk of getting penalized?
werd to TheWebographer
Zuko
Once again, I am not advocating the use of such programs. I don't use any of them myself. I was hoping someone might know exactly HOW SEs determine what sites to penalize for their use. Apparently, no one knows for sure and that is fine. Just wanted to know if anyone had any solid evidence that SEs do in fact, actually for sure, without a doubt have a way of finding out which sites to penalize. I suspect they don't but better safe than sorry I suppose.
>>Go out and nuke your competitors kids - it'll only cost you $150I think this will only result in getting your IP blocked.
Use a dial-up or a proxy server. If it does get sites banned them i'm sure there are many webmasters out there who would be prepared to persevere.
IMO to ban a domain for the use of a ranking check program is ridiculous:
It doesn't solve the problem. The reason Google say they don't like these programs is because of the server load. Google don't generally tell you why (or even if) your site is banned, so a webmaster banned for this would still use the program to try and find out why. They might even use it more as a result. Or on different domains - after all they shelled out $150 bucks for it, so unless they knew this was the cause of the ban, they'd still use it.
WPG would fast become known as a method to get other people's sites penalised (maybe it has already, I wouldn't know)
Finally, it is damaging to the relevancy of serps. Whether you check your rankings with WPG or not, this is no reflection on the quality of your site. Banning the use of Google would be an appropriate response. Banning a domain would seem to go against Google's entire philosophy on the results they return.
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries because we don't like the webmaster's choice of software
edit reason: spelling
[edited by: pixel_juice at 9:06 pm (utc) on April 24, 2003]
Just trying to look out for ya.
Zuko
I dont use any of the other functions at all because of the well publicised problems, but for me it was worth it just for page critic.
Don't forget, the Page Critic is only as good as its makers. There are no hard set of rules, only suggestions. What works for one, may not work as well for the other. There is somewhat of a science when it comes to writing copy for the web and that is where the power is.
I'll admit that I was probably one of the first 1,000 users of WPG. At that time it was the rave of the industry. AV quickly put a halt to that! I do have a current copy on one of my systems because I've been somewhat keeping track of its history. I've run the Page Critic on a few pages that are ranking highly and I'm not too sure that the Critic was in tune with my strategies. ;)
Yes, and the SEs' hope is that information remain proprietary. They surely spend millions of dollars to keep it secret, in order to keep their entire investment from becoming worthless.
Most people do not do that. Using a dial up which assigns new domains is the way to do it if you do. I have seen were whole blocks of IP coming from a dial up service have been blocked for serious violations thus causing a major problem for that provider.
Now to the crux, Google plainly states, don’t do it. Why would you want to even risk offending the Google gods who might smite you down while you run the query. Can you imagine life without Google?
It is very easy to look at your logs with a good reporting software to see what words people are coming in on and what pages are being hit. That is much more informative than a reporter mission run with WPG.
Sit down, write a little script, and that's itCan someone elaborate on how to write such a script. I am not basically from a web programming background.
Imagine a competitor web site who has a public web log available. A competitor can mine the referral keywords and plug those into WPG. Start your rank checks and utilize a lot of bandwidth [google.com]. Worse case, it is a denial of service attack on Google. ;) Unless WPG can mimic human behavior or space out the timing between each request, it wouldn't hard to detect the pattern an automation tool uses.
[edited by: sun818 at 7:11 am (utc) on April 25, 2003]
