What Does the Future Hold for SEO Rank Checking Software?
Another one bites the dust.
The popular SEO swiss army knife online toolset, Raven Tools, just announced that it will drop its popular rank checking component after receiving pressure to do so by Google.
In the announcement, Raven Tools states that it came to the conclusion following a failed Google Adwords annual audit, after which it was told to be out of compliance with Google’s terms of service, with particular regard to the section detailing data scraping. Raven CEO Patrick E. Keeble outlines specifics from the company’s exchanges with Google, noting with regret the difficulty of the decision to drop a popular component of the company’s toolset. From the announcement:
“This month, I’ve had to make the most difficult business decision about Raven since we created the software. It means letting go of a tool we’ve offered for seven years… Above all, it means preparing for a future that my Raven co-founders and I strongly believe is coming to this industry.”
Google’s History of Influence
Google’s pressure on Raven Tools is not without precedent. All-in-one desktop SEO software Market Samurai had to make a similarly difficult business decision back in January 2012, when Google made significant technical changes to its services that affected Market Samurai’s ability to retrieve data. Market Samurai’s solution? Switch to Bing. The tool’s developers opted to re-write many of the tool’s modules to pull data from Google’s largest competitor rather than Google.
SEO software giant SEOMoz came under similar pressure in November 2012, when it announced that its access to the Google Adwords API had been revoked. Though it didn’t give a reason, many SEO professionals speculate a failed annual Google Adwords audit.
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