Does Open Site Explorer violate Google's Terms of service?
-
According to Google's Webmaster Guidelines:
"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service."
Does that mean Open Site Explorer is a violation of those Terms of Service, or is it authorized?
-
I'm sorry - I meant to ask the question about the Rank tracker tool that you provide.
Don't get me wrong, I love these tools - I was just surprised when I read that in the Guidelines.
-
Hi Eric,
Open Site Explorer doesn't use Google at all, it uses our own crawl of the web which we call the Linkscape index. Hope that helps!
Jen
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spammy inbound links: Don't Fix It If It's Not Broken?
Hi Moz community, Our website is nearing the end of a big redesign to be mobile-responsive. We decided to delay any major changes to text content so that if we do suffer a rankings drop upon launch, we'll have some ability to isolate the cause. In the meantime I'm analyzing our current SEO strengths and weaknesses. There is a huge discrepancy between our rankings and our inbound link profile. Specifically, we do great on most of our targeted keywords and in fact had a decent surge in recent months. But Link Profiler turned up hundreds of pages of inbound links from spammy domains, many of which don't even display a webpage when I click there. (shown in uploaded image) "Don't fix it if it's not broken" is conflicting with my natural repulsion to these sorts of referrals. Assuming we don't suffer a rankings drop from the redesign, how much of a priority should this be? There are too many and most are too spammy to contact the webmasters, so we'll need to do it through a Disavow. I couldn't even open the one at the top of the list because our business web proxy identified it as adult content. It seems like a common conception is that if Google hasn't penalized us for it yet, they will eventually. Are we talking about the algorithm just stumbling upon these links and hurting us or would this be something we would find in Manual Actions? (or both?) How long after the launch should we wait before attacking these bad links? Is there a certain spam score that you'd say is a threshold for "Yes, definitely get rid of it"? And when we do, should we Disavow domains one domain at a time to monitor any potential drops or all at once? (this seems kind of obvious but if the spam score and domain authority alone is enough of a signal that it won't hurt us, we'd rather get it done asap) How important is this compared to creating fresh new content on all the product pages? Each one will have new images as well as product reviews, but the product descriptions will be the same ones we've had up for years. I have new content written but it's delayed pending any fallout from the redesign. Thanks for any help with this! d1SB2JP.jpg
Moz Pro | | jcorbo0 -
Backlink profile from Open Site Explorer does not seem to update
I have been monitoring our backlink profile on Open Site for over a year now and despite getting a number of new domains linking to us they are not reflected in the tool. Our URL is: www.BlueLinkERP.com Any thoughts on why this might be the case? The number of linking domains also seems very low compared with other tools we use (i.e. HubSpot)
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Rogerbot's crawl behaviour vs google spiders and other crawlers - disparate results have me confused.
I'm curious as to how accurately rogerbot replicates google's searchbot I've currently got a site which is reporting over 200 pages of duplicate/titles content in moz tools. The pages in question are all session IDs and have been blocked in the robot.txt (about 3 weeks ago), however the errors are still appearing. I've also crawled the page using screaming frog SEO spider. According to Screaming Frog, the offending pages have been blocked and are not being crawled. Webmaster tools is also reporting no crawl errors. Is there something I'm missing here? Why would I receive such different results. Which one's should I trust? Does rogerbot ignore robot.txt? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | KJDMedia0 -
Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site explorer's links not matching up
My question is why do my GWT's links not match up to the ones on Open Site Explorer. I watched John Mueller's video, and he said that they had problems with the link counts recently. After checking my links today, I can see that the problem is fixed, but my link count differs from Open Site Explorer. On Web Master Tools I have 307 links, but on Open Site Explore I have 42. Has anyone dealt with this problem? thanks. Peter
Moz Pro | | PeterRota0 -
Batch lookup domain authority on list of URL's?
I found this site the describes how to use excel to batch lookup url's using seomoz api. The only problem is the seomoz api times out and returns 1 if I try dragging the formula down the cells which leaves me copying, waiting 5 seconds and copying again. This is basically as slow as manually looking up each url. Does anyone know a workaround?
Moz Pro | | SirSud1 -
What's been the best SERP rank tracker for you?
I do a lot of my SERP ranking tracking via Aaron Wall's Rank Checker, but I'm realizing it's taking up too much time. I was looking at Raven's tools and a few others. What's been your favorite thus far? If you do reply, can you talk about: price capabilities time savings b/c of it graphical UI other thoughts I like SEOMoz's UI, but I can only manage 5 domains and I don't have a huge budget yet. Also, if there's a rank checker out there that incorporates google places results, that would be great too! Maybe too good, eh?
Moz Pro | | SeattleOrganicSEO0 -
Which tools are better? SEOMoz Tools or Bruce Clay's Tools.
I've ALWAYS wanted to hear some discussion on this, please give me your honest opinion so I can make the correct decision.
Moz Pro | | fergseo2 -
Site is penalized yet Google WTC and SEOMOZ says it's ok!
My first question on this community.. A high traffic site of mine has been severely hit for over two months. I took a look at GWTC and noticed a lot of suggestions on the HTML suggestions tab, where I believed that one or a combination of these errors/notices might been causing the penalty. At the moment of typing GWTC shows no HTML suggestions and minor meaningless crawl errors. Checking on SEOMOZ reported issues, I see zero errors except for a high number of duplicate page titles resulting from tag pages being accessible in the same tag title in paginations (tag.html?page=x) which can be fixed easily by using rel=canonical but I just know it can't cause such penalty. For reported warnings, site has a decent amount of title element being too long and missing meta tag description tags. I have been very active in the past with 301 inner pages of the site to make pages URLs as unique as possible and results were great, but that was long time ago before taking the hit. The penalty the site suffers from is zero rankings for newly added contents and old contents as well. It has also lost all rankings for its money terms. Site is not banned and still ranking top for its name which is a good thing. I am not sure where else I should be looking and will appreciate any good advices. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | HossamHossny0