How is SeoMoz different?

[NeilTompkins]

In the past I heard that other SEO type crawling software like WP Gold could seriously harm your rankings in the search engines - especially Google.  How is SeoMoz different ?

[danrawk]

hi,

not 100% sure what you are asking, but with that said, in most cases you are not putting any seomoz "code" on your website. seomoz's tools & website may crawl your website and offer suggestions and data on it in order to optimize that EXISTING code.

perhaps if you have 10 crawlers running at the same time it would slow down your site response, which could affect rankings, but as far as i know seomoz only crawls once a week on day listed in your campaign homepage

[NeilTompkins]

On for example Google's webmaster guidelines it states "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service."

How is SeoMoz different, if it doesn't send automated queries for the ranking data.

[firstconversion]

It crawls the web by itself and builds it own database to create the data. It doesn't crawl Google for the information, which is what that guideline refers to

[danrawk]

i don't believe seomoz submits any urls on your behalf. good there.  as to "check rankings", yes, i guess technically this would violate terms of service.

you could check rankings manually but that's going to eat up the same, if not more, amount of computing resource (and way more time!).  the results rankings are coming off of seomoz's crawler though, not your sites.

[NeilTompkins]

I totally understand that they build up their own database.  But they still need to crawl for example Google's search results to check the sites ranking ?

[NeilTompkins]

I understand, but I just want to be 100% sure that SeoMoz's crawler does not somehow violate the Google T&Cs and have it associated back to our site's URL.

[DonnieCooper]

Hey tommo, you are correct- and I understand your concern.

For rank tracking....
Yes, it is 'technically' against Google's guidelines to scrape for rankings, however- Google is very aware of SEOmoz, and has never publicly stated anything against them. (They did ask SEOmoz to stop reporting pagerank a few years back though.)

Although this is anecdotal and doesn't prove an endorsement.... at a lot of conferences, and on some whiteboard Fridays, Matt Cutts has been in touch with the Moz team. This puts me at some ease about Google penalizing all Moz users. After-all, this is an entirely white hat community

As for everything else besides 'rank tracking'...
seomoz uses linkscape, their proprietary crawler and index of the web. This means, whether you are signed up or not, they may still crawl your site (and probably will), because that's how OSE gets data to return in open site explorer.

One final point to keep in mind...
SEOmoz uses several data centers around the US, so using their rank tracking would lead back to them, not you. Anyone could just as easily track your rankings as you could, so how would Google know to penalize you? They really couldn't because otherwise, all you'd have to do is setup a campaign for your competitors and watch their rankings fall.

If you're super concerned, you could use everything in the web app besides rank tracking, and you'd have absolutely nothing to worry about
(and the price would still be worth it- in my opinion).

Does this help?

[edit]
Please Note, I am completely white hat, and if I had once ounce of suspicion that search engines frowned on the rank tracker in the web app, I'd stop using the rank tracker. And that's a decision everyone needs to make for themselves. Above all else, I study the hell out of webmaster guidelines and try to follow every rule and piece of advice that I can.