A couple weeks ago, Google slightly changed how they show the Google search results, which resulted in several search ranking software packages to not function properly anymore. I reported this under the title of WebPosition Ranking Software Being Blocked by Google? early on and Scott Goodyear from WebPosition commented here and also at WebmasterWorld with his two cents.

Scott took offense to me using the word “blocking” in the title. The truth is, I posed it as a question and Google was not technically blocking them, just yet. But will it happen? It seems like it.

Matt Cutts of Google has commented (once again) at WebmasterWorld on his stance on ranking checking tools, saying:

Does this mean that Google is now going to try really hard to prevent scraper based rank checking software? Seems like it.

Google’s JohnMu also commented at our site, explaining some of the history:

I am not going to get into the argument, if this should be allowed or not. I would hate it if people wrote scrapers to constantly scrap my pages, oh wait, they do. It is a waste of my bandwidth and can impact the speed of our page loads. At the same time, there are easier ways to get this data that might be more in accordance with the TOS.

There is also a big debate on why SEOs need to bother with ranking reports.

I’ll leave the discussion in the air.

Forum discussion at Google Groups, Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.