Manual Rankings or Automated? Plus and Minus?

[Titan552]

Hi,

I'm new to SEOMoz and one of the reasons I joined is for the automated keyword lookup feature.  I have a few questions I'm hoping people here can sort out for me:

1. Is SEOMoz is "danger" of losing the ranking tool as happened to Raven Tools?

2. I've been doing manual keyword lookups for a very long time.  With the # of KW (in multiple search engines) that I now need to track, a tool like SEOMoz seems invaluable. Now I appreciate that there are differences in the exact rankings, but I've noticed that while the SEOMoz google results are very close to my manual lookups (in Chrome Incognito mode), the Bing results are pretty far off.  Is this a function of Bing? Or is this the nature of the beast?  I'd like to save time by automating the lookups (and of course all of the other features in the rank tool), but I want to make sure I'm accurate.

3. Are many people out there using an automated tool only?

Thank you!

[AgentsofValue]

Hi Titan -

I'm not an SEOMoz employee - so I can only speculate here.

From the blog post on Raven Tools - they made the comment that the reason they decided to stop offering the rank tracker is because they failed an audit for the Google Adwords API.  Google gave them an ultimatum - either stop using scraped data, or lose access to the API.

From what I understand, SEOmoz was recently faced with the same problem, and they chose to drop the access to the Adwords API, instead of giving up access to the scraped data.  This is understandable, since SEOMoz's tools focus exclusively on SEO - while Raven offers a a wide range of services - some SEO, some PPC, some Social Media, etc.

So, I would be surprised if SEOMoz would stop offering the rank tracker.  Though I really have no inside knowledge about this at all.

I think the SEOMoz rank tracker is an internally developed tool.  Raven tools, and a lot of other SEO tools in the industry used a company called Authority Labs.

http://authoritylabs.com/

Rank tracking is the only thing that they do, and from what I've seen, their data is a bit better overall, if you're just looking for rank tracking.  They also do daily monitoring of keywords, which is a bit overkill from my perspective - but could be useful if you're in a very competitive niche.