Cool Stuffs

Popular search engine optimization, social media, and PPC metrics tool provider Raven Internet Marketing Tools has announced that it’s discontinuing its popular rank checker tool. This decision comes after failing to pass an annual Google AdWords audit.

This decision comes as a shock to the SEO industry, which relies heavily on ranking data scraped from Google’s search results pages to gain insight into the effectiveness of SEO campaigns. But what does it mean for the future of the industry?

In order to predict what the future holds, let’s take a look at what steps Google has taken leading up to this most recent event.

On January 29, 2012, the popular all-in-one SEO desktop software Market Samurai announced that it would switch from Google to Bing after Google made changes to its services that prevented Market Samurai from operating properly. From the blog entry:

“Several days ago, Google made some significant technical changes to its services that make it impossible to reliably perform large volumes of free queries.”

Since the switch, Market Samurai has continued operation using a mix of data from Google and Bing.

On November 14, 2012, SEOMoz announced its API access to Google AdWords had been revoked by Google. It didn’t explain why access had been revoked, but SEOMoz is one of the largest and most influential SEO data providers; it’s safe to assume that a failed annual Google AdWords audit was the culprit, likely for the same reason as Raven Tools’ API revocation.

Google’s terms of service are clear: Any product or product feature that collects scraped data or uses scraped data acquired from another source is not allowed. The penalty? Revocation of access to the AdWords API.

But why enforce the rules now, when the terms of service have been clear about scraped data for years? Google has huge expenses for its data centers, and large volumes of automated queries only increase those expenses. But is Google really just trying to cut costs, or is there a larger agenda?

Is Google ramping up its enforcement of its terms of service? If so, why now? Is this Google’s latest battle in its war against SEO professionals? Will Google continue to enforce its terms of service and threaten to revoke API access from other, similar service providers like MYSEOTool and AuthorityLabs? Will SEO tool providers follow suit with Market Samurai and switch to Bing as a data source?

Right now, the questions are more abundant than the answers, but one thing is clear: Google is flexing its muscle, and the SEO industry is on notice.

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Attention site owners: former employees, consultants, or contractors may now have access to your Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts. A Google security flaw has restored access to users who no longer should have that access.

As David Naylor explained:

From initial glance at our WMT’s accounts we now have regained access to every old account we have previously been given access to, whether that is a previous client or maybe a site that came to us for some short term consultancy. … Now that WMT is so much more powerful than it ever was there is a serious risk that damage could be caused to sites by people who no longer have permission to make changes. Things like disavow link lists, deindex urls or the entire site, redirect urls, geolocation alterations .. a whole world of pain.

If you haven't yet, go check your Google Webmaster Tools account and turn off access to any users who have been mysteriously reverified by Google today.

Reports of the security issue began trickling in this afternoon, and are now all over Twitter. Clients and SEOs this afternoon began noticing that an old agency or former employee suddenly was a verified owner – despite their access to Webmaster Tools being turned off in some cases for longer than a year.

Most of the reports seem to be related only to Google Webmaster Tools, aside from Naylor's report about Google Analytics.

One noteworthy example comes from Dennis Goedegebuure, the former SEO director at eBay, who today discovered he had had access to eBay’s GWT account, even though he hasn’t worked there for 15 months, the Next Web reported.

Hopefully Google will address this issue quickly, as there is definite potential for site owners to be harmed.

UPDATE: Google says the problem is now fixed. "For several hours yesterday a small set of Webmaster Tools accounts were incorrectly re-verified for people who previously had access. We've reverted these accounts and are investigating ways to prevent this issue from recurring."

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