Changes at Raven Tools!

[carlos4]

Do we know yet if this is Raven specific or if this is something that will affect all tools which use the API? Moz - what are you hearing?

I'm naturally very suspicious of everything Google does and this seems like they're moving to eliminate third party reporting services. Thoughts?

[randfish]

A few folks on this thread asked how this might affect SEOmoz. As you've probably noticed over the past couple months, our AdWords API and data access has also been intermittently down (and is now down again). This affects the keyword difficulty tool (though not the difficulty scores, as those don't use AdWords data), and it affects the keyword pages in the web app.

The basic story is that we're expecting Google not to give access back, but you never know. They're hard to communicate with, inconsistent, and don't have any guarantees, even though we pay for this data. Thus, my best guess would be that they'll be shutting it off for lots of organic tool providers (like Moz & Raven). If you want AdWords search volume data, you'll probably have to go direct.

Our plan in the short term is to start using data from Bing, and then eventually to see if we can build a good metric that correlates well with search volume as reported by AdWords (like we do with PageRank->MozRank or Page Authority->Google Rankings). It's gonna be a slog, but this appears to be how Google wants it.

[matbennett]

Thanks for the update Rand.

They're hard to communicate with, inconsistent, and don't have any guarantees, even though we pay...

In a weird sort of way it'd good to know that they treat customers of all sizes with an even hand

[JonathanSmith]

Thanks Rand...

It's amazing that a company the size of Google with the monopoly that it has in most markets can operate in this way.

[matbennett]

There is more from Raven on their blog today.  https://raventools.com/blog/update-google-adwords-availability-in-raven/

Interesting what they are saying (or not saying) about other people having access.

[carlos4]

The EVIL GOOGLE trend continues...

They're acting this way because they can and they will continue to push down competitors until the government steps in. This is what happens when a company becomes a monopoly.

[mypctechs]

Satisfying the shareholders at any cost really helps to simplify the decision making process considerably. Ever since the Google Wave debacle a few years back, it seems that everything I've seen new and innovative from Google has been less 'cool for techie' and more 'good idea to make more profit'.

It seems we can count the Adwords API as yet another project headed to join the scrapheap in the Google Labs junkyard. Useful for some but not profitable enough to keep around.

[randfish]

We've only received notice that we can't use it, even if we pay. I suspect that many other tool providers like us and Raven also had access revoked, but I can't say for certain.

[matbennett]

another update to this.  Adwords was restored to Raventools today.

[matbennett]

another update to this.  Adwords was restored to Raventools today.