Market Samurai Gone Useless [???]

Best advice..move on..I have already deleted Ms from my Pc..you know the saying good things don't last forever.

i stopped using market samurai after google changed they codes and made it useless. they took to long to update theres more programs out there that can do the job and better. like serpattacks lol. thats wat i use now.

If you take a look at the MS blog, you will see that they have announced that the results for in title and in url are no longer available.

They try and spin this into good news, because it means that reduced load on the servers results in a speeding up of other features.

However, realistically, of course there is no good news. And in answer to the OP, yes, MS is currently useless. If you can't analyse the viability of a keyword, then there is little point in using it. You can generate the same keywords through the google adwords keyword tool.

Time to find an alternative!

This software still does great at getting ideas and such. To tell the truth I didn't even look at the seotc. Just put in the work to get good bl to your site.

I just hate MS....will buy a new tool

all are absolutely right MS is totally useless now..suggest any other good tool.

How about Traffic Travis Pro, is good enough??

I'm having problems with MS itself, I hope its just temporarily. Aside from the SEOTC, i am having troubles with the MS's Rank tracker, the display of information is so different from SEO suite's rank tracker and MS is slower too .

Im sure the guys at MS are doing something to combat this bad publicity of it not working etc.

-Brandon

ok, confirmed. i ready their blog. and the funny thing is. they say this problem is "temporal" when google is changing their rules for good. it's too bad how they make it seem like it can be fixed.

they said they are trying to tap results from Bing but with no success as of yet and i don't think they will succeed (good news if they do succeed) but the point is...google results are superior. Google ranks #1 Bing ranks #20, now way i would be happy even if the succeed with Bing.

VERDICT: Market Samurai is useless now.

the only regret i have is...i just realized this minutes after i had bought it.

i won't bother asking for a refund. they need it cause their business prolly will go down from now. too bad.

Since I began getting poor results for MS, I've turned to Traffic Travis. It's been on my computer for a while and I guess I now need to learn how to use its features properly.

It's a real shae because i liked MS. I think the team put in a good effort building it and all the tutorials that went along with it. The realy pity is that i think most of the other features on MS are great and still work fine. The SEO competition tool, moetize page, content finder etc are all good. But the whole process starts with keyword research and now that's gone it makes the whole tool pretty much useless.

The other thing i never liked is that it was always a little slow. Not just in getting results but changing tabs etc.

I'm currently looking for an alternative. Havent chosen one yet but i have my eye on SEcockpit which looks like the most interesting for me.

If MS goes down due to Google changes, won't the others out there (Travis, MNF, etc) also go? Or is it a function of programming resources?

My MS is so unreliable currently it is really sad. But have had my money's worth if it fades away. I really hope not though. Fabulous interface and wide range of tools and info. Still much of value in MS but as noted above, keyword research is the main pillar.

I can't quite bring myself to slam MS yet

MS is undergoing a lot of bugs lately but they keep fixing things as things happen - software like this is going to always need to evolve because it relies on other systems and ways of mining data that are always evolving

Just make sure to keep up with the software updates and to report bugs to support (rather than just complain on their forum like a lot of people do) to get the most out of it

I still find MS to be very useful, I can research related keywords, see their SEO value and get a pretty good idea of traffic expectations, and size up the competition.

In the last month I've found 3 niches and put up three web sites that are right now starting to make money, all using data from MS, which tells me it's still useful. I probably would not have been able to find and zero in on those niches without MS.

Yeah it's not perfect software and is going through some bumps, but it still saves me a ton of time from doing all that research the "old way" - so I'm gonna ride it out and keep using it for now, I'm liking it, it still feels like a secret weapon.

In my personal opinion, MS will be worth it just for the ability to see which high PR links your competitors have.

@TB You can accomplish this with Scrapebox and some proxies on a far more efficient level.

I'm so glad that I didn't buy MS.

It's one of the few pieces of good news I've in weeks. ...and I've had a lot of really bad news lately.

It runs so slow on my computer that it is useless regardless of reduced features.

I'm really surprised at the number of people who are saying that Market Samurai should just be discarded. This is a knee-jerk reaction.

For the record, I have no official connection with MS and am not even an affiliate.

I've been using this tool for about two years, and it is far from useless even with the current -- and likely temporary -- lack of title (SEOTC) and URL (SEOUC) keyword data.

The MS functions that enable you to guage the viability of a particular market go far beyond SEOTC and SEOUC info.

Consider these points:

1 - MS is one of the best values you can find. It is based on sound, fundamental semantic principles that enable you to construct websites that rank faster. If you haven't done the training, you should, as it will enable you to get a lot more out of this tool.

2 - The SEOV estimate gives you a nice tool to determine the potential value of a market. Given two potential markets with similar statistics, the SEOV helps you choose the market that would give you the highest return on your hard work.

3 - The SEO Competition function gives you tremendous insight into the true SEO strength of the top ten websites for any keyword. (The SEOTC and SEOUC numbers might look great, but if you skip examining the strength of your potential competition, you could get steam rolled in a hurry.) You may discover that the top ranking websites are very weak or very strong. This is a critical point to consider in your decision making process.

4 - MS is supported by a passionate team of IM developers and researchers and they continuously upgrade the product. Think of all the products you have purchased that were essentially abandoned by the owner after they made a quick killing with the release.

I could go on and on about the valuable features of this tool. Bottom line, the value the MS team provides for a one-off payment far outstrips any other IM software product I have purchased over the past five years.

If you really want to understand how this tool works, check out some of the training videos in the Samurai Dojo at: Noble Samurai - Dojo.

I bought MS when things started to fall apart. Now I use the free version of Traffic Travis. Its great tool... I haven't used all the tools it provides. I can check to see where my site is ranked on the search engines compared to my competition. Its does a lot, still playing around with it.

You do raise some valid points alex, and I have personally had a huge amount of value from MS over the past couple of years.

I would stand by my point, however, that in it's current state it is nearly useless.

The keyword generation is just taking keywords from google keyword tool. You can do this yourself without MS, and there are better keyword generation tools out there that don't just use the google keyword tool as a source.

If I have several hundred keywords generated, I need a way to filter them down to assess whether they are viable competition wise. Without the in title or in url, I have no real way of doing this. Therefore I can't move onto the next stage of examining the top 10 competition (which you can do using the free version of Traffic Travis anyway).

Added to this that the rank tracker isn't working for me either, then there is little reason to use the software at all.

And given that the MS team have said that they are now looking to provide competition analysis through using Bing means that the software will become completely redundant. Bing and Google are very different. I make my money via Google.

Am I missing something. I am getting total local monthly searchs and possible number of clicks if ranked number one. Also in title and url is in the SEO matrix. Have I misunderstood what the problem with MS is. It seems to work fine for me?

I am concerned as I have just bought it and don't want to think that the results that it is sending me, are not all that accurate, there by making me target a keyword which isn't going to rank!

SEOTC not working anymore is extremely bad. If there was ONE interesting value it was SEOTC....so now the most important value is gone...

I have found a new good tool...but haven't tried it yet...." Keyword Sniper Pro" you can search on this forum

Damn I only purchased this last month. It was slow loading but worth the wait. Will check out the other tools mentioned in this thread

I got to say, even though it has it's pitfalls, I still find MS incredibly useful.

I need to stop buying software for a while. I thought that it was just me. Maybe I'll stick to online tools like Raven.

Last time I checked, MS was working ok.

As for the low keyword results, that's just because it is using only google keyword tool... there are tons of other keyword softwares that are getting a lot more results from various other sources (not just google) and can literally provide lists of over 5000 keywords related to a niche... now if you'd run that through MS you would end up with a few hundred low competition and searched keywords that you can target, compared to the usual 10 or less.

The only reason I use MarketSamurai is to check the competition.. there are several free ways you can get an accurate check of how many searches it gets.

i am still using MS...works fine for me...so far

the PR side of things doesnt return full results either , often only giving up 15-45 backlinks when theres more than 1000 , which is a bummer as thats a big one of my services that i now need to find an alternative for

Here are a list of other alternatives:
- Micro Niche Finder
- SEO Elite
- SECockpit
- Keyword Winner

I'm starting to believe the problem of " lack of keywords" on MS meeting the criteria of 30000 SEOC is because we need to add an adwords account to MS, thus increasing the keyword results up to 800 , without an adwords account you only get 100 keywords. Can anyone confirm if this is correct?

Still not sure if I should rush to buy MS once the trial expires... Also the OCI tab is not working right now..

I purchased the MS yesterday and after reading this thread I am some what scared, am I getting this right that the MS is no longer of any value or use if so where does that leave my $90 something dollars.

What exactly are you all basing that MS is useless on besides the OP having issues, will I get my money back if needed please could someone let me know, this is the first I have heard about the MS being uselss anywhere before.


I have added my Adwords account and I am getting plenty of Keywords back, but clearly there must be other problems based on how many members have left comments on here, I will only be using the MS for keyword for my business's only nothing else.

Lee

Would anyone care to elaborate on MS not working still please, as mentioned I have just purchased it and am slightly worried.

Lee

MS still works, it's just that some of it's key features (SEOTC and SEOURL) are no longer available. This makes it a lot more difficult to narrow down keywords to a reasonable amount because it is now difficult to assess their genuine competiveness (SEOC doesn't really help too much in this area).

There have also been issues with regards to the speed of the software, and it throwing up incorrect information (differening amount of backlinks, rank tracker displaying clearly incorrect results etc).

So it depends how you use it. I just use it now for keyword volume count and assessing the competitiveness of the top ten for a particular keyword. I use other tools to assess competiveness of a bunch of keywords and for keyword generation.

Would I buy it now? Probably not. However, I've had it a couple of years, and I've certainly had my money's worth out of it.

Hi Lee

I don't really want to give you advice on what you should and shouldn't do, that's really up to you to weigh up the options based on your research.

As I stated, MS does work, it's just a couple of the key features are no longer there. You can still do these manually. Just go into Google and put:

Allintitle:keyword (Instead of SEOTC)

Allinurl:keyword (Instead of SEOURL)

This just means that if you have several hundred keywords it's going to take you a while to go through each one.

SEOTC / allintitle is basically telling you how many web pages mention all of the keywords in their page title

SEOURL / allinurl will similarly tell you how many web pages have the specified keywords in their url

The above two methods are good way of giving you an idea of how many other web pages are targetting your particular keywords.

Allinanchor is another useful one

The one bit of advice I would give is to learn about keyword research so that you can build up an idea of what is likely to work or not. Which will involve building up and understanding of what all in title etc mean.

This will probably mean a lot of trial and error (well it did for me!), and some failures along the way.

The top ten google results analysis of a keyword is really the main bit, because these are the main sites that you need to beat to get to the number 1 spot. I just use the allintitle etc to narrow down my keywords to realistic ones.

What is the MS customer service like because I have contacted them but not getting anything back has been a couple of hours now, also when you mention to check the keywords using the llintitle:keyword (Instead of SEOTC) Allinurl:keyword (Instead of SEOURL).

I do not even know when I would need to use this method because all the MS videos are outdated and I am just left clueless now, with things not working and the guy talking about options and settings which are not even on my MS.


Lee

I've read so many good things about MS at this forum that I went ahead and downloaded the trial version. However, but the results that I was getting was very slow and analyzing the viability of the targeted keyword is gone. So now I'm in the process of searching for a good alternative software that has the same feature.

Anyone else having trouble getting the OCI values to show?

KateD

I got the refund so now just need to work out whats worth investing in, because I need something to grab decent keywords.

Lee

SEOTC was kind of nice, but definitely not critical for me. In my opinion, MS is still quite a useful keyword tool.

I can't believe some of you are just uninstalling and letting it go. I don't know what the rules are about it, but want to give me your registration keys at a deep discount? Hell, you're just throwing it away anyway! :-)

agree.................

Guys you need to realise that I purchased the MS tool two days ago, not knowing what a single thing did only to find on the MS blog that lots of settings have been deleted, then I find the videos are all outdated based on learning how to use it, lastly I stumble across a thread and read some comments with members not happy with it's performance.

Needless to say it has been pretty tough just trying to work out what the hell to do from here, I am tempted to re purchase it, however based on the videos being outdated and teaching you things which are not even on the updated MS, it's a slightly daunting prospect.

Lee

Hello,



just wanted to say that reading all these posts here, a person can get the feeling that the MS is the worst software out there. That is not true at all. Even with the two features deleted this software can still give you all the necessary information for a thorough market/niche analysis.



And if the SEOTC is really that big of an indicator for you than just do the google search with allintitle: and you can see the results there.



eg.: SEOTC: allintitle:internet marketing for begginers (you get the results how many times this phrase has been used in the title)


regards

has anyone checked out SECockpit yet? I think it is only being sold on webinars right now, but it looks super good. It pulls most of the info from SEMoz and had a good competition analysis tool from what I could tell. Definitely want to give it a whirl,especially after MS has crapped out.

Yeah exactly, thats what I get often when I had downloaded a trial version of MS. I finally decided its better to leave it.

Market Samurai now closed their support forum

I left MS and don't use it more. It was helpful for me some months ago but now its not useful at all for me and i don't use it more.

I use Traffic Travis.. it is simple and free

I wrote them and they said they are working on restoring the competition data. They did not say they were certainly going to do it though...

Without it, MS really loses a lot of its value and it not worth it. However, my experience with MS is that they generally keep on top of things so my guess is that the functions really will come back.

I was about to buy MS but glad I bumped in here.. For now, I will postpone it and will wait for an update..Lets see if they can fix everything....

email i rcvd yesterday from MS ...
Hi Jim,
Thanks for your email.
We have had some issues following Google's latest Keyword Tool updates that have prevented Market Samurai from correctly collecting data.
We have now updated Market Samurai to bring it into line with the latest version of the Keyword Tool.
You can now update Market Samurai to the latest version.
I have also reset your trial to ensure you have time to test out the latest version of Market Samurai.
Cheers,
Alex Green

Market Samurai is a well liked product, I'm sure it can be easily fixed

i am currently using trail version of MS (version 0.87.64), i have gone through entire thread over here, main dissatisfaction point everyone has raised about non availability of SEOTC and SEOUC which is again available in MS. Another point was on keyword research which is supported by Google keyword research, i am not sure what was supported earlier, so what is suggestion buy or not to buy?

MS is not what used to be. Also painfully SLOW.

better check with support they might help you

i still think MS is great software and i use it on a daily basis but i guess you just now need to look around for a good research alternative. for the $100 it costs you, even with it's current bugs the amount of time it will save you will pay its way