Hey guys, Do you think making this tool is possible in PHP: http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker I was concerned about how they actually perform the searches - whether they use an API key or just get the bot to go and look? It's pretty fast which is cool any info would be appriciated! Rich
I've been thinking of developing a couple of these tools myself, so send me a PM if you find information about it
I don't think there's any api involved. It's very easy to buld such a thing in php. The only problem I can see is when the server does too many page requests from google. They could ban you
They could ban you? Like actually ban your IP? How on earth would they do that? And would it be something they would do? Rich
They can,but I don't believe that you will be banned unless you do millions of hits to their servers each hour
They can, and will, ban you. The referring ip address is very easy to yank using any programming language. Automated querying google's servers is against their terms & conditions. The key to staying on their good side is to stay below the radar. To do so, you have to space out your automated queries. Never hit them with multiple queries over a second or two. If your needs are well above this ... I would suggest setting up a network of satellite sites and then query them to query google. Make sense? Use throwaway domains on different servers to stay under the radar. If one of your satellite sites gets banned, no biggie. Drop another $.88 on another one and set up shop elsewhere. google's api uses javascript (unless you have a soap api) so you are going to have fits pulling the data from there, if it's possible at all. Yahoo and MSN have no problems with this type of stuff, at least from my experience. Cypherus, I've got something similar already started if you want to shoot me an PM and pitch in. It doesn't currently pull SERPs but gets some other interesting information from the system.