Today we noticed signs that Yahoo are taking action on their API product BOSS, against users that are polling automated queries. In effect, this could cause many ( perhaps most? ) automated link management software to become obsolete almost overnight.
It turns out that automated queries were always against Yahoo’s Terms of Service. Who knew? (Well – Majestic SEO and Probably Linkscape did and have built businesses on the assumption that free was not forever.)
Here at Majestic SEO – when it comes to our API – people often sound alarmed and surprised to find that we charge heavily for the privilege of calling our API through automated queries. It is always hard to estimate what other businesses’ overheads are, but we always felt that Yahoo Site Explorer (the most significant public face of the BOSS API) was a significant overhead to operate. We know it costs a lot because we have an even more powerful product and we know how many machines are needed just to manage the scale.
It does bring us back to a fundamental question that tool suppliers will need to face up to when choosing one of the few alternatives available moving forward. Can businesses once again afford to use a technology which does not tie both sides into a jointly agreed, service level agreement? Majestic SEO has been careful not to distribute reseller rights to its full API too widely and has entered into very detailed agreements with its major reseller partners like Wordtracker, Raventools, Analyticsseo and Linkdex. You can be confident that these toolsets took the time to build tools based on sustainable contracts which are within their control.
You can also be assured that if you use Majestic SEO’s data for link analysis, our web based business is dedicated to increasing the scope and functionality of our data. We already show much more data than Yahoo Site Explorer or Yahoo Boss ever did in regard to links and since we started to update our fresh index daily our service is coming on leaps and bounds. That’s the beauty of being able to crawl billions of urls every week!
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Will that affect the outcome of our queries here?
May 4, 2011 at 10:12 pmIt won’t affect Majestic SEO data in the slightest. Our data is entirely our own!
May 5, 2011 at 1:12 pm(Please also use a name or anything but a keyphrase in the “name” field when you comment if you hope to have you comment linked)
MajesticSEO becomes even more valuable, hope this doesn’t call for a price hike 😉
May 5, 2011 at 8:32 pmYes I hope your prices do stay the same . Our team depends on your data from here and on raven tools. Keep up the good work Guys and don’t be opportunists like other folks . 🙂
May 7, 2011 at 5:53 amI thank Market Samurai every day for turning me on to Majestic SEO. It took me a little while to adjust to the difference in link totals between Majestic and Yahoo Site Explorer results, but now that I havem, I place more trust in Majestic’s results.
May 8, 2011 at 12:17 amWhen I found your website and the amount of data that you allowed us to buy. I was sold.
A 3rd party, who’s revenue stream forces them to be unbiased vs a search engine who’s revenue stream forces them to give biased data.
Free is never free. Good data is hard to Find, thanks for having the guts to index the WWW for all of us!
May 9, 2011 at 8:44 pm