SEOMoz Software

[kchandler]

I want to start off with stating that i am truly an advocate of SEOMoz and the great stuff they have done for the inbound community that we all know and love. I've been an active member since July 2010 and a paying pro member since December 2010. The software has always been monumental in helping my clients achieve their goals.

However, in the past few months i have received nothing short of buggy unreliable software. The keyword difficulty tool never returns difficulty results. The Adwords data has been gone since i can remember. The rank tracker tool is successfull close to 1 out of 5 times. OSE is updated terribly slow compared to competitors. Plus, I have had to write emails to get my campaigns to be manually refreshed to see new ranking data. I have simply missed deadlines because my data is always delayed or missing from the software. Am i an anomaly here? does anyone have these problems?

I have been researching some new tools as a replacement but i have yet to find anything as robust as the old SEOMoz. I'd love some feedback.

Cheers - Kyle

[randfish]

It's on the to-do list, but there's a lot of stuff ahead of it, so it might be a little while.

[kchandler]

Hey Rand - any chance you guys are still going to note the changes that happened?

[randfish]

I'll ask Dr. Pete to put it on his calendar to show the distribution of flux in further-back results. I suspect it may be a while, though, as he has a lot of other stuff on his plate already!

[kchandler]

Rand your response is exactly what i am seeing across all of my campaigns in SEOmoz. #1 listings maintained, listings in the top 5 grew a bit, listings in the top 10 maintained, but anything beyond that REALLY dropped.

Would someone on your team be able to release a post explaining this so we can share it with our customers? It is really hard to explain this rather complex situation.

Thank you in advance!

• Kyle

[randfish]

Hi Kyle - yes, we had to change to individually fetching the top 10, then 11-20, then 21-30, etc. This could have changed ranking positions in the 11+ range more significantly, though we haven't seen widespread reports of this. I would note that results past 20 are usually far more volatile than those on the first page.

[kchandler]

Rand It looks like across all of my accounts since you guys made your updates that my ranking results have fluctuated quite a bit. Not to the point that i would think that i am being penalized or an algorithm update but to the point that they now match other rank tracking software that i was hesitant to move toward?

So my question is, did you guys change how you get ranking results? Is it now more accurate than your old model (taking the top 10 and top 50, combine them, then de-duping the results)? This would be something very important to let your customer base know since it would effect how we explain the changes to superiors or clients.

Thank you in advance - Kyle

[kchandler]

Rand just ran a few tests and they seem to be working! Thank you for continuing to follow up on the progress!

• Kyle

[randfish]

Weird. KW Difficulty should be functioning as of yesterday afternoon. Can you try again and if you encounter an issue, send it to help@seomoz.org with your account info?

[kchandler]

Hey Rand, just checking in. It looks like as of yesterday morning (11/29) all of my new ranking data has finally populated!! Still seems like the keyword difficulty tool isn't responding? Any word on the status?

Thank you in advance - Kyle

[randfish]

Ranking data should be nearly done for every account - I believe our engineers said worst case was tomorrow for all accounts to be caught up. Keyword Difficulty is being worked on now.

We're also meeting this week to devote resources to a 3rd backup system (when the first two backups we've already built simultaneously fail, as happened this go around). Tragically, when you rely on third parties for data (e.g. Google search results) and they change things around constantly without telling you, staying on top of it is incredibly hard.

[kchandler]

Thank you for your reply and hard work over the holidays, Rand! Hope you still had some time for food and family!

[kchandler]

I agree, i demoed all of them and none compared to what SEOMoz has to offer IF they could get back to being reliable.

[kchandler]

Rand thank you for the long detailed reply. It is great to know you guys are working hard on the problems. It is just a rough call paying $200/month for a tool set that just isn't cutting it. I rely on your software's data to run the SEO portion of my company.

I logged on this morning and campaigns that i setup a week ago STILL do not have ranking results and the keyword difficulty tool STILL gives me an "unavailable" error. I guess the saying stuck between a rock and a hard place really hits home. I need the data you guys provide yet you can provide it.

[randfish]

Sigh - now I feel like a total ass. On Wednesday night, Google changed some markup, and our engineers didn't discover until this morning, and much of our team is out for the holiday. Thus, rankings collections in the app, rank tracker and keyword difficulty/SERPs analysis are temporarily throwing problems. We hope to have this fixed in the next 24-48 hours as Moz engineers get on top of it.

We're working on a way to have fallbacks even on holidays - I'm meeting personally next Friday with some folks.

[randfish]

Hi Kyle - really sorry to hear about your experiences. I'm not certain you're an anomaly, but it definitely sounds like you've gotten very unlucky to have such a rough combination of outages. In September, we did have rank tracking broken for a couple weeks. Crawl data has been accurate for 95%+ of campaigns and on time, but there have been a few that needed those manual refreshes (perhaps you've been caught in that bucket several times somehow, which must totally suck - I'm really sorry for that).

AdWords pulled their API from Hubspot, Raven, and SEOmoz all around the same time, so none of us have that access anymore. Thankfully, you can just click over to the public tool and grab it, but I know it sucks not having it right in the KW Diff tool.

The weird one is KW Difficulty itself - that should be returning results successfully. We've had an odd few hours each month where it's busted due to SERPs changes or hardware issues, but it's showing 99%+ uptime on our end. Rank tracker's odd as well - we've been seeing a few odd results, but it's working for nearly everyone (I get my report every week without fail).

In any case I can tell you that there's a whole team dedicated just to making sure that our uptime is high and that as problems/anomalies arise, we fix them fast. That team's called "production engineering" and there's 4 full time engineers there. We also have a larger engineering team that's working on a new version of the software that we believe will be A) a big step forward in features/UI/UX/etc and B) much more reliable and consistent - we're aiming for 99.99% uptime as a goal on all services, even when engines make weird changes on  us. I can't guarantee we'll hit that right out of the gate, but I know this team can eventually get there.

To wrap up - it flat out sucks that you had to deal with this. We should be better. We're working on it, and I really appreciate all the effort you've given to stay with Moz. If you do choose to go somewhere else, I'd totally understand and empathize, but if you stay, I promise that we'll have continual improvement.

[UnderRugSwept]

It's the trade-off you get. Those other companies may be faster, but they're not as accurate. SEOmoz may be the most accurate, but as a result, it's the slowest.

About a year ago, I signed up for trials of all the main companies that offer this kind of service, not knowing much about any of them. It only took me about a week of trying them all out to know hands down that SEOmoz was the winner.

Look ahead a year from now. By then SEOmoz will have gotten it together and will likely be the best in almost every way, including the ways they're lacking in now. Those other companies will more than likely be in a similar place as they are currently.

[kchandler]

Every other tool i demo (SERPs, Raven, WebPosition, etc), their ranking results just don't match up to what SEOMoz displays? How can so many companies serve up different results?