Thanks for the great tool, but it is a little disconcerting. I had no idea that microsoft hated me as much as I hate them I now know that I am ranked best with Google. Thank goodness for them, if I had to rely on Yahoo and MSN for business I would be out of business!
OK... I tried this once again today. I re-posted the php script in my advanced file manager on my Yahoo host site. They even have a PHP compose link although I noticed it still had the auto <html> tag at the top of the composition page. Does that matter..? At any rate I was able to "save" the script as a "php" then insert the php extension file name in my digitalpoint preferances for the MSN-Yahoo KeyWord tracking program. Even tried adding the "www" which "V.Summer" suggested to the filename but still the same response: "Invalid URL". If no one can help the lowly peon poster here then I guess I'll just be content with my excellent "Google" rankings... Thanks to anyone who'll take the time...
The script itself shouldn't be altered... so if something is inserting a <html> tag into it, it's going to fail.
Has anyone any idea of the bandwidth requirements for the script? I know it would depend on the number of URLs and keywords being checked, but lets assume a full Google API's worth of checking. The reason I ask is that I dropped the script onto one of my servers and it worked perfectly right off the bat. So I was thinking of offering the service to all the people who are having problems. But I'd have to charge based on bandwidth. If anyone is interested in having their script hosted let me know and I'll develop a pricing strategy.
Individually it's not much bandwidth... Running it for 25,000 users (probably still for like 24,000) it's quite a bit. The main issue you will run into isn't bandwidth requirements, but that Yahoo only allows 5,000 queries per day, per IP address. So if you start bouncing a lot of users off your server, you are going to run into the problem that made me spin it off into a separate script (limited to 5,000 queries per day, per IP address for Yahoo). Although you could get a bunch of free PHP hosting accounts and do it that way I suppose... heh
Happy Easter everyone ! Kudos to you Shawn for a great job on the keyword tracker. The approach and the script are both exactly what's needed. It works like a charm, and (for me) minimum fuss. The idea that retrieval becomes a local issue is fantastic - everyone gets to benefit from that. Actually, it worked so fast for me I thought i was looking at an internally cached copy of my tracker page ! Anyway - I'm chuffed. Cheers, JL
As some others have mentioned I think I can't see a way to add any keywords and urls to Yahoo and msn. All the check boxes are greyed out. So if i can't add anything to yahoo and msn i can't get the url to the script to validate.
Thanks shawn for this, you've made a truly amazing tool that extra bit more amazing. I also think it will stop me from focusing almost entirely on google, which can only be a good thing.
I may well be blind but I can't see anything about which search engines to query in the Preferences page.
Ok I figured it out, should have known, it was the same problem i had with the coop tool. The script is accessed by an agent that does not give referrer or ua info, ie 403 material.
When using the tracker with the new options and script installed on my websites it works fine for Google and Yahoo but is not working for MSN. Anyone know why?
I thought I had the same problem. So I sorted the results by search engine -- clicked on the "Search Engine" column at the top of the results chart. And then all the MSN results reported just fine.
Thanks Shawn... As mentioned I have the Yahoo web hosting service and when composing code in their advanced file manager yahoo auto-inserts an <html> <head> etc... tags at top of page. Why they would do that when you click on their "create PHP file" is confusing but after I deleted everything on the composition page and just inserted Shawn's php script code then went back and inserted the php file under preferances it did work..! Soooo... anyone having a problem with Yahoo! might want to consider this... When I say it worked I mean it posted all the keywords I inserted i'e: "keyword!url" for both MSN and Yahoo but my KW-ranking readout was N/A. I think I left off the "http://" in front of my url cause I thought I read somewhere on the page that it wasn't necessary to include. Was I wrong..? If so is there a way to edit my current keywords and add the "http://" or do I have to delete each one seperately and start all over again..? Hope this wasn't to long winded... Thanks to anyone for your input.
The http:// is not necessary. Try clicking on one of the keywords (the keyword should be a link) and see if you get an error.
Shawn... got this: request returned the following error: Unexpected result from your server: a:3:{s:7:"results";s:1:"8";s:5:"total";s:6:"536000";s:6:"detail";a:10:{i:1;a:2:{s:5:"title";s:84: then it goes on to list urls' etc...???
Well, today I ran it again and it stopped after checking only 23 kwp. Mostly google but a couple of MSN and yahoo too. It just stops showing no errors, nothing to say why? It only worked the first day for me and I ran it twice seemingly with no problems. If I just leave it alone and come back and check - nothing has changed. BUT if I refresh the page with the browser refresh while on the first page after clicking check all, it will show me the count down and will update the ones in the list. This is quite frustrating, I really do appreciate what you have done Shawn, don't get me wrong. I am just assuming maybe my server doesn't like be called from an outside source or something??? Is there something I should look for? Thanks, Shawn