SEOMoz Software

[randfish]

Sigh - now I feel like a total ass. On Wednesday night, Google changed some markup, and our engineers didn't discover until this morning, and much of our team is out for the holiday. Thus, rankings collections in the app, rank tracker and keyword difficulty/SERPs analysis are temporarily throwing problems. We hope to have this fixed in the next 24-48 hours as Moz engineers get on top of it.

We're working on a way to have fallbacks even on holidays - I'm meeting personally next Friday with some folks.

[kchandler]

Rand thank you for the long detailed reply. It is great to know you guys are working hard on the problems. It is just a rough call paying $200/month for a tool set that just isn't cutting it. I rely on your software's data to run the SEO portion of my company.

I logged on this morning and campaigns that i setup a week ago STILL do not have ranking results and the keyword difficulty tool STILL gives me an "unavailable" error. I guess the saying stuck between a rock and a hard place really hits home. I need the data you guys provide yet you can provide it.

[kchandler]

I agree, i demoed all of them and none compared to what SEOMoz has to offer IF they could get back to being reliable.

[kchandler]

Thank you for your reply and hard work over the holidays, Rand! Hope you still had some time for food and family!

[randfish]

Ranking data should be nearly done for every account - I believe our engineers said worst case was tomorrow for all accounts to be caught up. Keyword Difficulty is being worked on now.

We're also meeting this week to devote resources to a 3rd backup system (when the first two backups we've already built simultaneously fail, as happened this go around). Tragically, when you rely on third parties for data (e.g. Google search results) and they change things around constantly without telling you, staying on top of it is incredibly hard.

[kchandler]

Hey Rand, just checking in. It looks like as of yesterday morning (11/29) all of my new ranking data has finally populated!! Still seems like the keyword difficulty tool isn't responding? Any word on the status?

Thank you in advance - Kyle

[randfish]

Weird. KW Difficulty should be functioning as of yesterday afternoon. Can you try again and if you encounter an issue, send it to help@seomoz.org with your account info?

[kchandler]

Rand just ran a few tests and they seem to be working! Thank you for continuing to follow up on the progress!

• Kyle

[kchandler]

Rand It looks like across all of my accounts since you guys made your updates that my ranking results have fluctuated quite a bit. Not to the point that i would think that i am being penalized or an algorithm update but to the point that they now match other rank tracking software that i was hesitant to move toward?

So my question is, did you guys change how you get ranking results? Is it now more accurate than your old model (taking the top 10 and top 50, combine them, then de-duping the results)? This would be something very important to let your customer base know since it would effect how we explain the changes to superiors or clients.

Thank you in advance - Kyle

[randfish]

Hi Kyle - yes, we had to change to individually fetching the top 10, then 11-20, then 21-30, etc. This could have changed ranking positions in the 11+ range more significantly, though we haven't seen widespread reports of this. I would note that results past 20 are usually far more volatile than those on the first page.

[kchandler]

Rand your response is exactly what i am seeing across all of my campaigns in SEOmoz. #1 listings maintained, listings in the top 5 grew a bit, listings in the top 10 maintained, but anything beyond that REALLY dropped.

Would someone on your team be able to release a post explaining this so we can share it with our customers? It is really hard to explain this rather complex situation.

Thank you in advance!

• Kyle

[randfish]

I'll ask Dr. Pete to put it on his calendar to show the distribution of flux in further-back results. I suspect it may be a while, though, as he has a lot of other stuff on his plate already!

[kchandler]

Hey Rand - any chance you guys are still going to note the changes that happened?

[randfish]

It's on the to-do list, but there's a lot of stuff ahead of it, so it might be a little while.