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What I am wondering is if I can use it to check the status of keywords or will I be penalized/ banned from certain search engines/ have my Ip blocked...etc.
I would not be using it to submit the sites just to check the status of my keywords on certain engines.
I am pretty certain that I read on here that it is frowned upon, by the search engines, to use such programs, he did not believe me and insisted that I use it.
I would not mind getting reports to present to clients, but I do not think that alone is worth it if it is frowned upon.
Thank you in advance,
George
ps: sorry if this is in the wrong category
It's a running joke I've heard: "Give your competitor a free copy of WPG...."
LOL :) Poor old WPG I wonder what will happen to that next year, insn't ironic that Firstplace Software has a PR5. I wonder if they use WPG to check there own rankings :)
The best course to take with rank checking is logfile analysis software.
you can quickly appreciate where you need to improve and where you are in great position without even looking at Google, or any other search engine for that matter.
The big flaw in rank-checking, IMO, is the implicit assumption that the performance of your site can be measured by a tiny number of phrases, werty. That may be true for some industries and keywords. However, you are likely to find that the bulk of your traffic comes from multiword searches that are quite unpredictable. One site I work with gets thousands of referrals a day and ranks very well for some of the major keywords in its field. Nevertheless, 95% of its traffic comes from searches that generate at most a few hits a day and many of which are unique. Ranking software won't tell you a thing about this. While being #1 for "blue widgets" may be an indicator of your performance for a variety of related phrases, like "buying blue widgets", "blue widget info", etc., that isn't always true.
Brett wrote a good article years ago about using log files to discover new search phrases - if it's still around somewhere, that would be worthwhile reading.
Q: [Webmasters] Will I get banned for running automated tools?
A: If you use a utility to check your rankings at a high rate you will. Use only in the off hours and slowly. Programmed querying is one of the #1 problems in the search engine business today. Google is taking a mild to aggressive stance to thwart it.
Google has also banned entire ISP's where abusive spiders have been run from:
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Last Updated:04/21/2002 - 12:25 added by:Brett_Tabke
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You also might want to try using Alexa's Traffic Detail. If your site is ranked somewhere within the Top 100,000 the detail can be very enlightening and you can compare your site to your competitors.
[traffic.alexa.com...]
i just did some sites that i did key word purchasing for. one of them spiked into the top 100,000 when i started the keyword campaign.
this will be a great little chart to show the management here when i talk to them next week about actually getting a position. currently i am freelance.
Check for Google rankings on AOL
oop's forgot my manners Welcome to WebmasterWorld
I noticed that the site you are no doubt referring to seems to have taken precautions to prevent bots from using them and abusing the SEs. Perhaps as long as the site can ensure that their users aren't automated, these searches will be OK with Google et al.
Officially, I would say "NO, don't use it".
Practically speaking, Google is the only search engine I know of who has specifically said they might ban you for using one. Given that, you would probably be okay running WPG against the other search engines, then searching Google by hand.
If you're only worried about your own companies site, it should take you less than a minute to search Google by hand. After all, if you're not on the first few pages, does it matter if you're number 150 or number 3,625,711? No one will ever search that deep anyway....
Good luck!
thats why i was wondering what the risks were. i am yet to use it on this machine, and hopefully i will not have to.
on a side note, i read some tip book that comes with the software...it is like 150 pages. so many of the techniques used in that are considered spam.
i am all for using this site and doing everything(other then html) by hand.
In a couple of threads within the past couple of months Googleguy has specifically referred to WPG position checker when discussing why some sights were banned/penalized.
That's from the horses mouth (sorry GG).
Jim
