According to a thread in the WebmasterWorld.com forum, GoogleGuy has stated that Google is testing and improving its software to put the kibosh on rank checkers and automated programmatic queries. This move by Google is to thwart viruses and Trojan horses on a user’s PC that are sending automated queries to Google.
GoogleGuy states, “Recently, we’ve started to improve the software, and it can also detect lots of things like rank checking and other automatic queries to Google. Of course, we don’t show the message to everybody that comes onto our radar, but our new software looks pretty good at detecting programmatic queries. If you’re using WebPosition or other software that sends queries to Google from a program, I’m not surprised if you’re going over a threshold where your queries are on the radar.”
This news should put a chill into First Place Software (makers of WebPosition Gold) and the users of this software even though WPG has been singled out by Google for some time as an application that violates their Terms of Service. Apparently, there has been a picture that pops up recently, when too many queries are made asking for manual intervention and Gold users may be faced with this and also the possibility of having their IP address banned.
As one can imagine this new development with checking the rank checkers has stirred up some questions within the SEO community, such as how many queries are too many, is it still safe to use the Google API Key for rank checking and how do you run an SEO business without automatically checking the rankings of customer and competitor websites?
Anyway, Google is aware of these issues and perhaps this news and discussion will serve as a nice trial balloon for Google to refine and define future versions of this new software that will serve its purpose without stepping on too many toes.
