Thoughts on scraping SERPs and APIs

[Boogily]

I'm perplexed about a couple of things.

Google says that scraping keyword rankings is against their policy from what I've read. Bummer. We comprise a lot of reports and manual finding and entry was a pain. Enter Moz! We still manually check and compare, but it's nice having that tool. I'm confused now though about practices and getting SERPs in an automated way. Here are my questions

• Is it against policy to get SERPs from an automated method? If that is the case, isn't Moz breaking this policy with it's awesome keyword tracker?
• If it's not, and we wanted to grab that kind of data, how would we do it? Right now, Moz's API doesn't offer this data. I thought Raven Tools at one point offered this, but they don't now from what I've read. Are there any APIs out there that we can grab this data and do what we want with it? (let's day build our own dashboard)?

Thanks for any clarification and input!

[randfish]

You're much too kind Happy New Year!

[Boogily]

Hi Rand. Anyone ever tell you you're awesome?

I just did. Thanks bud

[randfish]

Hi Boogily,

A) In terms of ToS, I'm not 100% clear. I know that Google has been strict about automated rank checking programs installed on a user's local machine, and they've enforced that a bit through technical and guidelines means. However, they've been unclear about companies like Moz, Searchmetrics, GetStat, AuthorityLabs, Conductor, Brightedge, Yield, RankAbove, and hundreds of others which provide this data in their software. I suspect they don't love it, but tolerate it and haven't taken action for over a decade now.

B) On the API front, check with GetStat and AuthorityLabs. I believe they both have rank data offerings from an API standpoint. Moz doesn't offer that and probably won't in the future, either.

Cheers!