Last month, we had informed our readers that Google had blocked one of the most popular search engine ranking softwares WebPosition and other automated rank checking softwares, to which Google’s Matt Cutts gave an explanation. Later, it came to our attention that, Google was testing new HTML structures and layouts for its SERPS (search engine result pages), that further confused the ‘scrapers’ and blocked all their rank checking attempts.
However, now, according to a thread at Webmaster World, WebPosition Gold is now back online in Google and so are other rank checking tools. Here are a few excerpts from the thread at Webmaster World.
“I’m seeing rankings being reported as normal in WPG despite the block that went in to affect at the start of August. Both .com and .co.uk are showing results without the Incomplete File (CF_NP) failed attempts. New proxies i wonder? Or has it been unblocked by big G?â€
“I’ve noticed that the tools I use are all working now, too. It seems the main problem was that Google was making repeated tweaks to the source code for their search results and that meant that tools needed to adapt to those repeated changes. One tool I use was updated 3 times in less than a week.â€
I agree with Tedster. It is not really a block, but Google just changed their source code so all ranking tools that are based on code scraping were not working.â€
