Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Harry,

I'm really sorry for your frustrations. While we are still working with Google to get our access to AdWords data back, we are also investigating other options to provide search volume data that would not rely on AdWords, but it will take some time for us to research our options and develop code to provide that data.

The good news is, we don't actually use the Google AdWords data in our calculation of keyword difficulty; that is just supplimental information used to give some context to the difficulty score, so those reports are still 100% accurate - they're just missing the information we pull from the API, which you can get at https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool in the meantime.

Please let me know if you have any other questions. I'm here to help!

Cheers, Chiaryn

Glad to help, Steve! The www would definitely change the metrics you are seeing!

Let us know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in with a great question.

The social media information is based specifically on the URL you are inputting, so it would not include the likes on the Facebook page for the site unless you are specifically looking up facebook.com/examplebusiness in Open Site Explorer. For example, for www.seomoz.org OSE shows 155 Facebook likes (http://screencast.com/t/m0curvDuwsVU) while for www.facebook.com/SEOmoz it shows over 79,000 likes (http://screencast.com/t/34eHBJ4IEu). All of the metrics in the top section of OSE are specifically related to the exact URL you are researching and would not pull in information for other URLs.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Steve,

Thanks for writing in. You can't really specify localities in the Compare Link Metrics section of Open Site Explorer, but if you are checking your competitors using different TLDs, that would affect the metrics you are seeing for the competitors. If you can give me some exact examples of the sites you are comparing in that section, I can look directly into the issue you are seeing.

Our system isn't set to show different results based on different regions; it just shows different results based on the number of links to a domain, which would change between TLDs since example.com vs example.ca would be considered two different domains.

I look forward to hearing back soon.

-Chiaryn

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you are running into some issues with the Keyword Difficulty tool. Unfortunately, Google has changed the way that they present rankings information, so we have had to make some changes to our collection in order to keep up with these changes, I'm afraid that this has caused some issues with providing the real time data for the Keyword Difficulty tool and the tool is currently unresponsive. We are hopeful to have the tool working again within the week, but at this time, unfortunately, we do not have an exact ETA for when that tool will be up and running again. I thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.

We will be posting updates on this issue in our Known Issues forum when they become available. You can access that forum here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/22457872-keyword-difficulty-and-rank-tracker-issues

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

-Chiaryn

Hey Sean,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you are running into some issues with the Keyword Difficulty tool. Unfortunately, Google has changed the way that they present rankings information, so we have had to make some changes to our collection in order to keep up with these changes, I'm afraid that this has caused some issues with providing the real time data for the Keyword Difficulty tool and the tool is currently unresponsive. At this time, unfortunately, we do not have an ETA for when that tool will be up and running again, but we are hopeful to have the issue resolved by the end of the week. I thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

-Chiaryn