Market Samurai. Changes

I was just discussing the state of Market Samurai with someone else.
It's a real shame, as a year ago it was a high quality tool.

Unfortunately they rely on other models such as Google and just can't keep up with their changes.

There is some hope in this message:

Our current estimate is that we'll have the vast majority of Market Samurai's functionality working again within the next few days. The revised Rank Tracker module may take us several weeks to fully implement, though you can still check small numbers of keywords manually in Rank Tracker, as well as checking Bing and Yahoo! as normal.


Please be assured that as a small software development team, we understand that delivering great value is what keeps us alive and what built this business in the first place. When the dust has settled, we're determined to do whatever it takes to ensure the investment you made to own Market Samurai is the best Internet Marketing investment you've made.


However, if at any time you don't think Market Samurai is worth your initial investment please contact our help desk for a partial or full refund--just be aware that our help desk has a high volume of tickets at the moment, so it may take a little longer than usual to get to your requests.


As the net (and Google itself) continues to evolve, certain products are going to be negatively effected. At least they're promising that the "majority" of functionality is going to be stored; the rank tracker will take a few weeks, and finally they're offering partial or full refunds.


But remember, as bad as this might seem, oftentimes when one door closes, two doors open in its place!

I have been with them since 2009, lately I had alot of issues and they couldn't resolve them to I stopped using their keyword research module and I wasn't very happy but I use the other modules..it is a great software after all..best thing I ever bought

I am going to try the new company they suggested and see how it goes, 30 days free trial.. I hope they can come up with the same API, not sure how to check my rankings now since I tried other tools and they sucked, I don't suggest checking the results on MS even if its a small quantity since you use your ip and it might get banned.. if u r using Google webmaster then it might be an issue too.. anybody knows any other tools?

It is only the end if they want it to be, I have always seen a coder that can do anything legal to get what they want if he really wants too.

Wow, over 400,000 users for Market Samurai ... I didn't think they had that many users. Their tools was great and provided a lot of useful data. For me Market Samurai has been working on and off over the last 6 months or so.

I don't think so. They will figure out what to do to stay the course for us IM'ers. I have full confidence in the peeps at Market Samurai.

I think you have you give them some time to adjust to Google's latest changes and come up with a plan of attack.

I'm sure it will not be a quick fix but i think they will get there.

Kickin it on Amazon

Gaz Cooper
Amz Training Academy

Yup — got this notice from the software today, little bummed. Basically, nothing works now. Time to move on..?

The loss of functionality is a little disappointing. I use Market Samurai for two purposes: Keyword research and rank tracking. The other concern is that if they can't accurately track rank, then they can't give any information on SEO competition in terms of the top 10 listings for a particular keyword. This means this functionality is useless as well.

The fact that I paid a premium price (fair, but premium) and will lose half, or all, of the functionality that I need the product for is a little upsetting. I know it isn't their fault, but if I bought a product to do 2 things and the market changes and it can't do either of those things anymore, then I don't know what I will do.

I also don't want to have to pay a monthly fee for something that was a built in benefit.

I understand they can't cover the cost of managing that particular feature, but I may have to be one that requests a partial refund (I can't ask for a full refund because I got about 3 months of good use from it)

There is a lesson here for us IMers though. Market Samurai made a great product with really cool features, but the functionality of their product relies on a third party that they have no control over. With a simple change at the third party they have hundreds of thousands of disappointed customers - many of whom I imagine will be asking for full or partial refunds. The problems are likely also costs a fortune in extra work or manpower to bring back the functionality they can salvage. That is a risk that should be notated and that is the type of thing that can happen when your business relies on third parties you have no control over.

I hope they figure it out, they offered a full refund if the user is not happy, but I won't request a refund since I took more than what I paid for.. other developers will just close and run away with the money but they were generous enough to offer a refund

"However, if at any time you don’t think Market Samurai is worth your initial investment please contact our help desk for a partial or full refund—just be aware that our help desk has a high volume of tickets at the moment, so it may take a little longer than usual to get to your requests."

Google is becoming annoying lately.. with all their privacy policy BS and now limiting the access, their results suck too..bing is more accurate but at the end of the day they control the search engine market

Never used the Market samurai. Not that because I didn't like the features and well. But mostly because my budget would not allow me to use than, moreover I can use the Google adwords keyword tool.

So not a problem for me!!

I finally got round to downloading it and trying the 6 day free trial yesterday, Looks like I picked a bad time to do this!

I am testing that raven tool.. man the information that it gives is crazy..not that I am promoting it but I took a fast glance and added keywords , u actually can add your competitors and track how they are moving and how you are moving in the serps side to side.. but its 99$ a month.. thats alot!

I understand what's happening to market samurai and to SEOQuake as well.

I'm also a developer and created a keyword tool (keyword miner)
but because of Google's changes until now I'm having a hard time
releasing version 2 of my product.

It's nearly impossible to get a consistent result when reading
google's free tools nowadays. And the only thing I think would
work is if you pay them to get search data. I know they have
a paid package for this though it's limited to a few thousand
searches and would not be viable if you create commercial software.

I'm playing with several options now but because of the barriers
the software is now still in the late planning stages.

I've never used the Market Samurai tools myself, but I must say that it indeed looked like a very powerful tool for those wanting to get an edge over in the IM game.

Sadly yes they do rely on Google Adwords and the such, and given that the Adwords tool seems to update itself rather frequently, it would make Market Samurai have to constantly revise the software in order to keep up with the changes and not have it broken. Like how it is now.

It is a shame that the end is near for Market Samurai when they've been such a big player in the SEO industry for a long time.

The biggest issue is that they charged a flat fee; there is no way they could continue to pay for server costs and programming costs to keep on doing rank tracking without steady monthly revenue coming in every day. Which is unfortunately the case with almost any downloadable rank tracker (especially one that isn't using external servers).

I am surprised at the increased difficulty in tracking SERPs, the way the SERP tracking I'm using is coded up we haven't faced any increased problems recently, still smooth sailing.

Hey Warriors,

Market Samurai has had some issues lately which is some bad news for features I use regularly from it.

Here is a update on there blog -
Noble Samurai

If you've tried to launch and use Market Samurai in the last few days you'll have noticed that there are large areas of functionality that are broken.



What Happened?

As you know, Market Samurai pulls data from dozens of different search data providers so that you have all the data you need in a single place to make the most informed decisions about your online marketing opportunities.

In order to obtain this data we often need to perform large numbers of queries and searches through free services such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing on behalf of our users.

For example, tracking the rankings for even a few keywords can require thousands of searches. By performing these queries on your behalf, using our servers, we saved you hours, days or sometimes even weeks of time compared with doing these queries by hand.

Several days ago, Google made some significant technical changes to its services that make it impossible to reliably perform large volumes of free queries.

As large portions of Market Samurai currently use Google's service, this has temporarily broken a range of functionality in Market Samurai (and related products, including modules from Domain Samurai and Article Samurai - although the core syndication functionality in Article Samurai is unaffected).

It's also worth noting that most other SEO software has been affected in some way by these changes (eg. SEOQuake is currently broken as well).

What We're Doing About It...

We're working tirelessly around the clock to restore the vast majority of this functionality, and we estimate that most of the application will be functional within the next few days.

As there is such a large amount of functionality that is currently built upon Google's services, we're prioritizing the high usage modules such as Keyword Research and SEO Competition, and then moving on to the other modules.

What Are We Going to Use In Place of Google?

It's important to note that much of the data that we supply in Market Samurai could have easily been provided from other search engines. (eg. locating articles about "dog training" in our Find Content module).

In these simple cases we're going to just replace Google with Bing.

As you know, Bing has made some big improvements in recent years and there are many who are saying that Bing's algorithm produces more relevant results than Google for many keywords.

As an SEO marketer, it is important to understand that Bing's index is rapidly approaching the size of Google's, and as they also power Yahoo!, they have rapidly grown to capture over 30% of the search queries in the US.

But why is this important?

The increased use of Bing as a search engine is important because competition metrics, such as SEOC ("SEO Competition") and SEOTC ("SEO Title Competition"), measure the scarcity of keywords on the Internet. The idea behind keyword scarcity is that keywords that have a high scarcity are likely to be more useful keywords for your marketing campaign. A good candidate for a more detailed competition analysis, by using our SEO Competition module matrix, would be a keyword where there aren't many pages on the Internet containing that keyword in the title or body of a page - i.e., keyword with a low SEOC/SEOTC value.

These high-level competition "scarcity" numbers can also come from another search engine, as long as the index is of a comparative size to Google. We believe this is the case with Bing.

It's important to note that making a keyword decision based solely on a scarcity metric such as SEOC or SEOTC will provide poor results. It's not a substitute for doing a detailed analysis by using the SEO Competition matrix and a backlink analysis.

The scarcity metrics help us quickly filter out keywords that are highly likely to be TOO hard to rank for (because they have a lot of relevant content out there competing for rankings). They DON'T tell you that a keyword will be easy to rank for. (i.e. use these numbers only to disqualify tough keywords)

Until this change is implemented, we've unfortunately had to introduce a manual check for SEOC values, similar to that for the SEOTC/SEOUC values. We understand that this is frustrating and time-consuming, but it was the only way we could keep this data available.

Changes to Rank Tracker

The module most affected by these Google changes will be the Rank Tracker module.

The Bad News...
With over 400,000 users now, tracking the ranks of your keywords on your behalf results in literally millions of Google searches every day. Google's changes mean that it will be simply impossible for us to continue doing this on your behalf.

Unlike Bing and Yahoo!, Google has no API (commercial or otherwise) which is suitable for tracking rankings. The APIs that do exist for Google often produce results that are significantly different from actual rankings, making them useless for SEO purposes.

There are third-party companies that do have accurate APIs to Google, and we are currently in negotiations to get access to their data.

The particular company that we are talking to provides the ranking data to major SEO tools such as the excellent Raven Tools product, for example.

However, this data is expensive (Raven Tool's cheapest plan costs $99 a month to track 1,000 keywords), and the underlying cost of ranking data is a large part of the reason for this price.

We've evaluated many options and it seems, at this stage, that the only way for us to offer Google Rank Tracker functionality to our users is to buy this data.

However, with a fixed-price product and so many users, it's simply an economic impossibility to provide the same rank tracking functionality on an ongoing basis. In fact, it would cost us over $40,000 a day to purchase this data!

So, we're left with the difficult decision of having to pass this costs on to our users in some fashion (most likely a monthly paid service).

Please know, if you're an existing Market Samurai buyer we'll try to keep this cost as low as possible. Potentially we will even try to offer a free level of service for a small number of keywords.

Unfortunately, this change will take a while to implement, at least several weeks. So until that time you may need to check your rankings manually, or perhaps try the 30 day trial at Raven Tools until we can get the new version of Rank Tracker out the door.

We'll be releasing an updated version of the existing Rank Tracker module shortly, that will enable you to check a very small number of keyword rankings in Google (up to 10), by using your own connection rather than our servers to perform the searches. This is a temporary workaround until we can put a more permanent solution in place.

The Good News...
However, the news is not all bad. Rank Tracker has always been a very slow module to use due to the higher numbers of searches it requires.

The new Rank Tranker module built on the paid API will enable us to check your rankings in the background from our servers each week, so that when you open Market Samurai, you'll instantly be able to see your rankings report--instead of waiting upwards of 10-30 minutes to check all your keyword rankings.

What To Do Next

We know the implications of these recent Google changes are very disappointing and will cause some anger amongst our users.

We understand this, and while we these changes are beyond our control, I want to apologize on behalf of the whole Noble Samurai team. We're very grateful for the support of our customers over the years - you're the reason we can do what we do! We deeply appreciate your patience through this difficult time.

Our current estimate is that we'll have the vast majority of Market Samurai's functionality working again within the next few days. The revised Rank Tracker module may take us several weeks to fully implement, though you can still check small numbers of keywords manually in Rank Tracker, as well as checking Bing and Yahoo! as normal.

Please be assured that as a small software development team, we understand that delivering great value is what keeps us alive and what built this business in the first place. When the dust has settled, we're determined to do whatever it takes to ensure the investment you made to own Market Samurai is the best Internet Marketing investment you've made.

However, if at any time you don't think Market Samurai is worth your initial investment please contact our help desk for a partial or full refund--just be aware that our help desk has a high volume of tickets at the moment, so it may take a little longer than usual to get to your requests.

Once again, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers.

We're working around the clock to get this fixed.

Please leave any questions, concerns or encouragement (we could use a little bit right about now!) in the comments below.

Yours sincerely,

Eugene Ware
CEO
Noble Samurai

I don't blame the guys at MS. It's not their fault Google continues to stuff them around. And if Google's changes are making it hard for them don't you think it's also stuffing up others in the same field?

I have every faith in them and I believe that they will find away around whatever Googles done ti sutff them around.

The SEO module is 95 percent functional now
thats all I ever used anyways

the only thing not working is the PR .......................Indexed pages supposedly is not working but who uses that or cares about it? I dont

You guys are crying like the sky is falling
I dont believe it

serps tracking? you guys actually track all those kws? that would drive me nuts
I only use the SEO Function , thats almost fixed

I think if MS were about to fold they would not have just done almost a complete revamp of the entire software which seems to be what is happening

most companies about to fold just do nothing, start cleaing out their desks, dont respond to emails, and start packing up the bank accts and head out of town

does that seem to you guys what is happening? I must have missed that

It's a shame really. I used it mostly for the SERP checker. I think if enough people ask for the refund it could well see them off.

Well, it still does what i want it to do. I never found its Rank Tracker to be reliable anyway.

This is a bit ridiculous Market Samurai. If a human can still go through and search the rankings of every keyword then you can absolutely make a robot do it. I'd love someone with more knowledge of these recent Google changes chime in and tell me what exactly has changed so much. Why can most other software still track. I think this is pretty lame on their part.

I have been using Market Samurai for over a year and a half now and I can say that it's a wonderful tool. I understand that they are having difficulties with functionality due to Google's recent changes but it normal for any software to go through this. I think the staff will work hard to get this program up and running to get things back to normal. On the other hand, I don't agree paying a monthly fee for a rank tracking service and I hope there is a free fix for this. I believe Market Samurai will be back better than ever when the team gets things straighten out but I despise paying any more money for it.

I think the best solution is to make a separate cloud, we add the keywords and they show us the results on 3 days period , so basically they can do the search as slowly as possible on their end and we see the updates once a week or twice , that would be the ideal solution.. they can ask the owners to pay a one time fee so they can build this system..I wouldn't mind paying a one time fee.

If you guys dont like paying a monthly fee for rank tracking
go find a free alternative? there isnt one

So you spent 100 bucks? So what?
So it doesnt track 1000 kws any more for you, for FREE

so it has a few bugs

It still works great for analyzing google top 10 , thats what many many people use it for

Just because you feel gypped, ? you want the rest of the board to do what? have a group cry?
So you lost 100 bucks? First of all I think most of you have gotten 100 bucks in value from the software. IMO there is nothing else out there that does what it does. If there were, I would buy it.


If you feel that gypped go file a class action suit against them,

Do something, instead of fill the board with your garbage whining posts
I know I certainly am getting tired of it

You guys must live with your parents or something thats the only explanation I can think of
Hell I remember a few years back I lost 10,000 dollars trying to start an adult online chat site

sh*t happens,
You have never lost money before, or owned a business before, thats my only guess

If they can stabilize the software it would be great. I've gotten a ton of use out of it over the 6 months or so that I've had it -- when it worked. There were many weeks it just didn't work well and then they'd do an update and it would work again. I've come to learn not to rely on it anyway.

Does this affect Traffic Travis as well?

I suspect that this affects all keyword apps that rely on Google. What about Longtail Pro?

I almost purchased this tool. glad I didn't.

If you think Market Samurai is the only SEO tool you can rely on, you're wrong. But I hope that MS will solve some problems that the customers are experiencing right now. There are tons of SEO tools you can count on, and other new and innovative tools are upcoming as well.

It's funny how their message to their users is pretty much "Well we still have Bing...". Thanks, MS. For those of you who are new to IM and just bought MS, sorry. That sucks. For the rest of us, it was definitely worth $97 but it's a shame to see it go.

I suspect the problem w MS is more of a design flaw w the software than it is googles problem. the biggest hangup with MS is that they never had proxy and de-capcha functionality.

Other apps that I use for rank tracking still work just fine bc they incorporate proxies and can blow through captchas w/o a problem.

the first sign MS was about to blow up was several months ago when they started requiring you to update SEOC data one by one (and entering captchas) whereas it used to grab everything at once.

the user base picked up on this right away and requested added functionality to utilize decaptcha services which MS ignored and came back with excuses as to why they wouldnt do it.

the real reason they wouldnt do it is because MS is coded in adobe air which is an illogical choice of language for an app the size of MS. There also arent any decaptcha services that have an API for adobe air.

for MS to work properly, they would have to get rid of the idea that they can store google data on their servers to then pass onto the user as well as rewrite the app in a language other than adobe air.

there's a couple of problems with MS's response to the loss of functionality:
1: using a BING for SEOC data is a total joke. Yes, bing usage has ticked up but its NOTHING compared to google usage (i cant post links bc of my post count but do a google search for "search engine market share") regardless if their results are more accurate for keyword searches

2: the notion that no one has an API for google is a joke as well:
"Unlike Bing and Yahoo!, Google has no API (commercial or otherwise) which is suitable for tracking rankings. The APIs that do exist for Google often produce results that are significantly different from actual rankings, making them useless for SEO purposes."

"There are third-party companies that do have accurate APIs to Google, and we are currently in negotiations to get access to their data."

the 2nd quote contradicts the first. also the APIs that do work properly are merely implementations of the already existing google API's (google search "google api")

basically, MS got caught with their pants down then the tide went out. **and it was avoidable**

MS was a great tool but the writing was on the wall months ago. what MS says publicly vs what they "know" are two different things entirely. I'm laughing at all the people saying that they handled this situation so well as in reality they have been mishandling it for months.

It seems likely Google really doesn't want search data being scraped and then sold to people via a third party.

They might consider that 'brand damaging,' especially if they're charging others for data through an API. It's unreasonable to expect this many queries go unnoticed.

Google isn't really giving that much away free these days, especially keyword research data. I assume they would prefer people got their keyword data by purchasing Google Adwords.

Do you guys who understand what just happened to MS with their abilities to track etc
think that
they will get the PR functionality back with SEO function?

they lost this when Yahoo Site explorer went belly up
then they got it back and I used it for about 2 wks right up until the last few days when everyone started complaining

do you think this will come back? its not rank tracking for kws just PR of sites and PR of backlinks?

This is why it is so important to never rely on only one tool or only one method of doing anything online.

Things are always changing.

Here's my thing: I've been using Domain Match Pro and was getting a whole lot of "no" when looking for exact match. So, I switched over to Google's Public DNS. Not only did that solve the issue, everything including MS and all its functionality is MUCH faster. As in I can't believe I didn't do this sooner. Rank Tracker non-withstanding, if you find MS slow, try switching to Google's DNS. The difference is night and day.

guys, the problem is NOT with google, the problem is with marketing samurai, don't you realize? don't be so gullible.

link-assistant's rank tracker i'm using is working just fine. so are the other tools mentioned here. i mean, c'mon!

@outwest,
you are outright outrageous, man. calling dissatisfied customers "cry babies" is just... unethical, man. karma is a b..tch and i really hope it gets back to you.

amen

I have to agree with SEOtraveler, I also believe the problem lies with Marketing Samurai,
it is said they made a strategic error in the early stages of development when designing the architecture of the software. And this now causes this problem, no relation with Google; I second that I also have other tools showing no problems at all with what MS claims to be the problem.

Nevertheless this knowledge doesn't help us getting MS working again and their switch to Bing is an emergency move imo which I am not happy with at all.
Unfortunately lost my faith and money with MS.

Any suggestions for a reliable and simular AIR app?

Here is an email i have just got from Link Assisatant. i was just evaluating the MS free trial when it started crashing. i am so glad this happened today as I was about to but it this week!!!!

I wish I still had an oppertunity to get a refund, we all bought MS with Google as engine, with Bing it is useless imo. Feel robbed.

Thanks for the heads up!

I just downloaded the Link Assistant software for free..seems to be working just fine.

Does anybody know any descent alternatives to Rank Tracker of MS? I hear a lot of people complaining but I did not find many answers with alternative. And before you offer those alternatives, please make sure they are actually working at this time. I would not be surprised if all of them are not functioning properly now (due to the Google update).

I actually really like Market Samurai...I'm using Link Assistant's software purely for the rank tracker until MS (hopefully) fully fixes their issues.

BTW, I love how one of the tags for this thread is crying...lol

Magic Rank Tracker + Keyword Scout

Well it looks like MS has made their Rank Tracker work like all other desktop providers. i.e. it is now performed locally. MS does have (and always had) proxy support for those who wanted to do ranking locally.

Here is what Miriam from Noble Samurai said about Bing integration:


She makes a good point that these metrics are to show what's out on the web and while they will be slightly different to Google it doesn't change their validity.

Meaning Google isn't the only game out there. If they were, there'd not be ANY other search engines. Personally I think Google forgot the "don't be evil" bit quite a while ago. There is a new blog post that should answer everyone's questions.

i skimmed the MS blog updates, isn't the only real thing affected the rank checker? which is a shame, i used it lots.

Things are moving fast in digital age. You need to learn to adjust, if you want to do business in Internet age. Market Samurai is doing pretty good job in catching up with all updates that are coming. I think they should start charging some small monthly fee for their service to make sure that they have enough resources to make all necessary updates.

After reading through the MS blog, it appears that they are trying hard to fix whatever problems the software has. Offering a refund with no questions, no matter when MS was purchased, is unheard of from the majority of product vendors. Give them a chance to redeem themselves.
Mel

Your a little late... problems are sorted now lol.