Market Samurai - Dead?

I love this app. But it's been slowly getting slower and less functional of late. Still, I don't begrudge paying what I did, it's been worth it. Now looking at new alternatives ... mostly cloud based. Have you heard of Raven?

I bought it just before it started getting dysfunctional so I am less appreciative of it's usefulness. Since I paid for it, it has pretty much been gathering digital dust.

This is going to be a huge! Many marketer's are going to be very angry!

I find it less and less useful ever since the Panda update

Yes I have used it and it is very effective.

LOVED Market Samurai for the longest time. Seems to have been getting worse and worse recently.

I was thinking about buying MS soon. Good thing I waited.

I wanted to throw in some perspective on this issue since I have my own market research/keyword software that faces many similar issues as MS.

It doesn't really matter whether a keyword tool is cloud/web based (like mine) or desktop based (like MS) anyone who gets data from Google by scraping faces the same issues.

MS, MNE, SpyFU, SEMRush, KeywordSpy, etc all get their data from Google so if Google makes it next to impossible to get the data then all of these tools and services face the same problems.

As to whether or not it violates some Google policy is actually pretty irrelevant because any kind of scraping has always been against Google's terms in one way or another.

All those automated rank checkers out there?

They all volate Google's policies.

Companies and people can spin it anyway they want but techinally any tool that scrapes data from Google without permission (and does anyone think Google really grants permission to anyone) violates their TOS in some way.

Which is funny because Google's entire business is built around scraping other people's content and then selling ads around it :-)

So Google has started making it extremely difficult to get their data. They ban and block IP addresses much faster and more aggressively than in the past so it requires a ton of different IP addresses and some pretty sophisticated bots to scrape the data.

That's why you see tools having trouble getting inanchor, inurl, intitle, etc data because Google either bans ips super quick or returns unreliable results that change each time you perform a search (or at least are not consistent across numerous searches)

Next they revamped their keyword tool and have made it very difficult to scrape.

Just search around the freelancer sites and you will see tons of requests for Google keyword tool scrapers but many have no bids or have been cancelled.

Now they are beginning to strip the keyword tool of usefulnes such as taking away the monthly trend data and now the CPC data from the free external keyword tool

The only way to get the data now is to login in to a Google account to access the tool which surprise surprise is much easier for Google to monitor and block activity that looks like scraping.

So how about the Adwords API? You can get data from it right?

Sure but with two major "gotchas".

1) you have to pay to use it

2) You can't create tools to automate mass lookups or they can ban your API account/license.


The end result is forcing more and more tools to rely on using the API in some form and paying for the data and the end users of the software will need manually intitiate some of those lookpus (no biggie really just click a button...but it will cost to get the data which is the bigger issue.)

Now this may sound all doom and gloom but really it's not. It's just the reality of the situation that is shaping up.

There are still plenty of ways to scrape most of the data and it will be very hard to stop data scraping cold but it seems Google is stepping up their efforts.

For my part we will continue to adapt to the changes and build better software and data scanners so if I'm not worried being a smaller software vendor then I'm sure the guys at Market Samurai will figure something out.

Anyway, just wanted to shed a bit of light on the behind the scenes stuff that it takes to put these kinds of tools out there.

How hard does Google crack down on this though? I mean, considering that out of the millions of people who use Google < 1% of internet users actually use these softwares.

Yes, my AdWords account info is tied Ok but makes zero difference. My AdWords account is active too, so I am giving Google some money to pay for their services! Talking of which I am having to use their keyword tool more often directly and it works fine.

What a bummer. I just purchased MS a week ago and it worked for a couple of days. Of course, now I've discovered - like most of you - that it no longer works. I'm really pissed that they didn't imform everyone of this problem. I will try to get my money back, but so far MS support hasn't even replied to my request for more information.

Anyone know a good alternative?

I've been struggling with Market Samurai since last October. Last month, I said to H#$! with it and got Traffic Travis. I couldn't be happier.

Good news!

Market Samurai's working fine for me again.

Well done to the team at Noble Samurai for fixing the bugs.

Best

Eldo

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tools and don't rely much on third party Google API-based applications.

i always use a crack version but i feel the speed is so slow for me along with my 1mbs speed. This is a real kick A,,, dummy slow

I seem to had some issues with MS as well. It seems like there is a new update every other day. After the update it seems to work fine.
I have been using Traffic Travis as an alternative.

Signed up for a trial version of Market Samurai just yesterday and things went smoothly and as hoped for.

I bought MSAM a long time ago and have recommended it since, right now I've had to move on. If they get their game fixed I'll happily start using it once more but until then I have a business to run so we bought a years subscription to Wordtracker. At about $370 for the year it might be beyond some people's budgets ($69 mo if you go month to month) but if you are serious and you want a powerful fast and very cool tool that gets the job done, then Wordtracker is it.

James

I'm glad that I am not the only one whose been having issues with Market Samurai. It isn't anything major other than just gradual slowing of keyword generation and SEO checks. Hopefully they can work something out with Google whereas I won't have to lose one of my most prized IM tools!

Yea MS is slowly dieing along with all the other scrapers, but until then scrape on



CHAD

Hi Everyone,

Most of the issues with Market Samurai are now resolved by either updating to the latest version of Market Samurai or installing Adobe AIR 3.

We're also working on a major update that will make keyword research and rank tracker run much more smoothly.

Regards
Miriam

Maybe, didnt work for me too

I see, so this is the situation. No wonder MS was updating too frequently these days. Every day/time I opened MS there was and update waiting. I'm only using MS to check the SERP these days.

I don't know what's going on at Market Samurai... or if they even give a "fly'n..." but this company will end up loosing massive $$$, Mind-share, and Market-share, over-night if they don't immediately "GET THEIR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND" Tell us what's going on MS NOWWWW if you hope to have any business in the future, that is... unless you are just a "flash in the pan" take your money and run company. It's obvious from all these posts you are pissn off all the Internet Marketing community and they have a large voice that is pointed directly at your future profits

Hi Everyone.

We're continuing to work on the bugs and as Google changes things from under us we're adapting. We have no intention of letting Market Samurai rot!

We also understand that all this fighting fires with Google isn't the best way forward so we're working on a brand new approach that should significantly improve Market Samurai performance and stability.

If anyone has any further queries or issues with Market Samurai please let us know via support@noblesamurai.com so we can help you out.

Regards
Miriam

It seems to be working peachy for me :-)

Just need to apply the updates, when requested.

Cheers, Peter

many of the people in the forums are complaining that MS has become very slow lately
i am thinking of buying the MS..but waiting on the fence because of the complaints!

Market Samurai is working fine for me. They update it often and tech support is responsive to any problems. Great program.

working fine for me also.. make sure you update it to the latest version!!! and make sure your windows is up to date.. latest .net and flash etc.. and also adobe AIR latest VERsion is a must!

I just got the program, but it's not living up to my expectations. I've tried to run a couple of seo competition searches with different keywords yesterday and today. I have a decently fast internet connection, yet the thing takes like 10 min to load the result (no joke!), that is nothing like I've seen in the videos of people advertising. And it seems like 90 percent of the time, it comes back with some error about not getting the PR, etc.... Anyone have any ideas how to resolve this, I have version: 0.87.96 and run the program on a quad-core I7 Imac.

Yeh the error I keep getting almost everytime says:

Error Requesting PR Values

Error Connecting: retried too many times.