Does Google Block Web Position Gold Ranking Reports?

[webmama]

Has anyone else noticed that after years of threatening it appears that Google has now blocked WP Gold from reporting rankings through their tool? We called the WP support line and they said they are waiting for Google to 'do' something and have NO ETA has to when it will be fixed.

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WebPosition and Google - The SAGA:

Backround history:

Penalise you for using webpostion gold: (April 2003)
[webmasterworld.com...]

Google and position checking software: (Jan 2003)
[webmasterworld.com...]

Whats the status of Google vs WPG Users? (July 2002)
[webmasterworld.com...]

What exactly gets banned using WebPositionGold; the website or the IP (June 2004)
[webmasterworld.com...]

Web Position Gold & Google IP bans (May 2009)
[webmasterworld.com...]

(sorry the org thread about google banning WPG from 1999-2000, was lost)

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 3:06 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] added history links [/edit]

[sc0ttkclark]

I wasn't aware Google had an API that returned large amount of results to be used in this manner..

[razoras]

SO the battle continues, it seems. Ran fine after the last update but we're back again this week with more errors.

[sc0ttkclark]

Items were changed from <div class=g changed to <li class=g

And interestingly enough they have no end </li> for the items :-)

[tedster]

A tool that I use at times has had three updates in the past week, just trying to keep up with the changes in the format.

[pageoneresults]

A tool that I use at times has had three updates in the past week, just trying to keep up with the changes in the format.

Ah-ha, they've got some sort of dynamically generated thing going on with the output. Every 24 hours it is scheduled to generate a variation in the html output. Google just put it on auto-pilot after testing these past few weeks. < Me "Tin Hat" is always on during these types of discussions. :)

[sc0ttkclark]

Perhaps it's scheduled, perhaps it manual, but whatever it is, it's changing a lot in the past few weeks. It's also leaving a bloody trail of non-w3c compliant carnage (in the hopes to throw off conventional scraping).

[razoras]

Maybe it isn't intended to hurt scraping, even though that was my initial conclusion. It seems like unnecessary labor for too little benefit, and there's only so many ways you can change such simple pages in such minor ways that you can disrupt automated tools while presenting the same user experience.

[sc0ttkclark]

Format changed again

[razoras]

Yep! So what changed this time?

[sc0ttkclark]

I'm not telling the secrets to the universe as this is available to the public anyway but the <!--m--> and <li tag switched places.

[rustybrick]

JohnMu of Google said, this is likely related to [googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[randle]

Experimentation is a very powerful tool, and we use it very widely to test potential changes to search.

Such as the results themselves maybe?