WebPosition Gold penalty? Options

Today, I read this message in 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. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google. "

This is the first I knew that Google did not appreciate WebPosition rankings queries to it's engine. (I read their webmaster guidelines last month and either missed this statement or is has been recently added.) WebPosition Gold is recommended by many SEO specialists and I felt it was a reputable choice for my customers.

In November I used the WebPosition report on two customer sites: www.newmarkdevelopment.com & www.newlifeoffice.com. Both of these sites have been dropped from the index - (the page rank box is blank on my google toolbar). Have these sites been penalized or blacklisted from Google due to my WebPosition report?

Is there a way I can get these sites put back into the Google index?

I have posted this message on Google's forum also - so please forgive me if you see it twice!

Some years ago Google were penalising sites for using WPG. I haven't heard of it happening lately but there's no reason to suppose that they don't still penalise for it.

Are you certain that there's no other reason for a penalty, such as making use of link farms, or using optimization techniques that Google might not like?

If you are certain that there's nothing about the sites that Google wouldn't like, you could try emailing them, explaining the situation and telling them that you didn't know about WPG, and that you won't use it again on their sites. It's worked before but they don't care about your sites so don't hold your breath.

Phil.

If there's any way at all for Google to be sure which site is running the WPG, they most definitely are penalizing the sites. It's not always possible as competitor's can run it, etc. However, if they see a dedicated IP, it's often easy to figure out who the company is and also the Website.

Running it only twice makes it seem doubtful that you'd come under their radar, but you never know. If you have any WPG reports loaded on your site that they can see, and it shows Google, that right there would pretty much screw you!

Jill

Thank-you to both of you for your insight.

This is a portion of the response I received from Web Position Gold on this issue:

"Google does not like automated queries conducted on their service. Although it is extremely rare, if not impossible, that a WebPosition customer gets banned for running the Reporter, it can happen if you conduct an excessive amount of queries. That's because the current versions of WebPosition do NOT pass your domain name to Google when conducting queries. Therefore, there should be no way their server could identify your queries to your particular Web site in order to ban it.

We admit that we do have some concerns that Google's Toolbar program that some people use could be used to set cookies or other things to help identify people conducting certain activities. We have seen a forum posting earlier this year that indicated that Google may have used the tool to track down the author of a product that reported PageRank outside of the official toolbar program and demand he stop publishing such a tool. Therefore, although WebPosition does not record cookies or things that could easily associate your domain name to queries you do, we cannot vouch for what information the Google toolbar could communicate to Google's server.

If you want to error on the side of caution, consider using the toolbar on a separate machine and IP from all your other SEO work, whether using WPG or otherwise, or not using it at all. (If you never downloaded their toolbar and installed it in your browser, then you don't need to be concerned about this). If you DO use this toolbar program along with WebPosition's reporter and have found your site banned, then there is the potential that the program communicated back to Google's server what you were doing.

Although your Web site is not likely to be banned, your IP address that you use to connect to Google could get blocked in rare cases if you do a very large number of queries in any automated tool. Always try to minimize your queries (avoid searching 100's or 1000's of keywords). Don't conduct them more often than necessary (usually once a month is sufficient). Run your queries at night during off-peak hours. Use the "Be courteous to search engines" feature on the Options tab of WebPosition Gold 2. If you have WebPosition Gold 1, consider upgrading to version 2 for better emulation of a browser. Use the Slow Submit feature on the Options tab of the submitter. All these things minimize the chances of your IP being blocked from Google. If you are blocked, then your Web site is still found on Google normally, but you are unable to search Google from your regular internet connection until you get a new IP address from your ISP or switch to a new ISP."