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WebPosition_Release_v20_and_Reject_Reporting_Issues
| WebPosition Release v2.0 and Reject Reporting Issues
As you would have heard, FirstPlace Software, creators of the
hugely popular WebPosition Gold search engine marketing
software, recently announced the forthcoming release of the
long-awaited version 2 of their product. WPG v2.0 is already
available in Beta format (see link below) and boasts an
impressive number of new features to help web masters ensure
their web sites are spider friendly, ranking highly and
submitted to the most appropriate search engines and directories
worldwide. I recently took the opportunity to interview
President of FirstPlace Software, Brent Winters, about their new
product and also about his views on the increasing crackdown on
automatic reporting tools by some of the major search engines.
Below is a transcript of the interview:
--------------------------- (WR) = Web Rank, (BW) = Brent Winters
Question 1 (WR) - Why has it taken so long for FirstPlace
Software to release a new (BETA) version of WebPosition Gold?
(BW) A couple of factors contributed to the delay. We
under-estimated the amount of work to keep the current version
up to date with the continuous changes at the search engines,
while still contributing resources to version 2. We ended up
spending time adding and removing engines in the existing
product, adding new features, etc. so we were not standing still
since version 1.0. In fact, we are on version 1.60.5 now. We
eventually added new developers to accelerate work on version 2.
In addition, version 2 includes a tremendous number of new
features and engines. In retrospect, we should have scaled back
the number of features for version 2 and saved more for version
3. Fortunately, our customers will benefit from getting a lot of
bang for their buck when they upgrade. Question 2 (WR) - In your
opinion, what is the most important or significant feature of
the new version? (BW) There are so many important features it is
difficult to boil it down to a single most important feature.
Every customer will have their favorite depending on how they
tend to use the product. Certainly the support for new country
specific engines is a big one. Unlike other products, this
support extends beyond just submission and reporting. The Page
Critic also provides valuable advice for how to improve your
rankings in over 75 major engines. A current (although not
exhaustive) list of new features can be found at:
http://www.webposition.com/wpg2upgrade.htm Question 3 (WR) - The
BETA version of WPG v2 includes regional search engines -
something your customers have been asking about for years. Why
did it take so long to include these? (BW) See above Question 4
(WR) - Only a handful of countries were included in the regional
engines. Do you plan to include other country search engines
(e.g. New Zealand and more Asian countries) in future releases?
(BW) Please keep in mind that you are looking at a beta version
right now. We are working hard to add new engines to fill any
significant gaps and are listening to customer feedback. For
example, you mentioned Asian countries. We already have support
for some Japanese and Chinese engines and are working on adding
more. We support a dozen different regions currently: Global/US,
Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Spain/Latin
America, Russia, Italy, Japan, China, Scandinavia and the
Netherlands. Some countries like the UK have support for eight
or more engines already (or will very shortly). Others have only
a few. How many they have depends on how many popular engines we
are able to locate for that region, and how far along we are in
the development of that region. Even after we release the
product we will continue to add more engines (or remove engines)
as things change and we receive feedback from customers. We may
add support for entirely new regions depending upon demand.
Question 5 (WR) - The major search engines, most noticeably
Google, have recently been taking a stand against the use of
rank reporting software and even banning the IP addresses of
persons using it. How has this impacted WPG sales and how will
it affect future releases? Can you confidently say it is safe
for customers to use WPG right now to check their ranks? (BW) A
very small percentage of customers had their IP blocked by
Google in early 2001. I've heard of no one having their IP
blocked for using WebPosition on any search engines for over six
months since we released updates to more precisely emulate a
browser. Version 2 includes an additional safety feature to slow
down searches to a user-definable amount. That way you can be
more courteous to the search engines while maintaining a lower
profile. We continue to encourage customers to keep their
queries to a minimum with the search engines (For example,
there's generally no reason to run reports every single day or
for hundreds of keywords). You should also run reports at night
whenever possible. As far as our sales, they remain strong and
demand for the product remains strong. Businesses with an
on-line presence have a significant need to track and improve
their search rankings. That is not a need that is likely to
change anytime soon. Only the methodology and techniques to
improve visibility on the engines have changed over the years
and will continue to change. We'll continue to update the
product to accommodate that. Question 6 (WR) - Is there any
scope for arrangements with search engines that allow your
software limited access to their servers in a restricted
reporting capacity, similar to Overture's recent 3rd Party
provider agreement with Bid Management Software companies? (BW)
We already have formal affiliate agreements with many major
engines including Overture, FindWhat, Looksmart, Bay9, Ah-Ha,
About.com, and others. It is our goal to work with the search
engines whenever possible and reach mutually beneficial
agreements. We approached Google last year, sending over half a
dozen letters and faxes to various VP's in their organization.
We offered practical proposals to create a more mutually
beneficial relationship. Eventually we gave up on the matter
when their VP continued to fail to get back with us as promised.
It does not appear to be a high priority issue at Google right
now from what I can tell. Question 7 (WR) - Do you have any
exciting new features you plan to add to future WPG releases?
(BW) We always have many features we'd like to add. However,
we're focusing our efforts right now on finishing the
long-anticipated version 2 and making sure all the features
included in it work really well. We may not bang out a major new
upgrade every six months because we focus a great deal of effort
to refining the product to work as advertised. Many companies
focus on including every bell and whistle under the sun, whether
it has value or not, and then invest little time to fixing bugs
reported by customers. This can be maddening as a consumer and a
huge time-waster if you buy a whiz-bang great product and then
do nothing but waste time trying to battle crashes, lock ups,
etc. In our case, we are so serious about producing a quality
product that we offer up to $50 bug bounties to customers for
being the first to find and report a problem. (These are credits
good for the purchase of an upgrade, knowledge base
subscription, or other product). It should also be kept in mind
that we update the product weekly if not more often so our
technology is never standing still between major upgrades. We
also prefer to give customers new features and updates for free
rather than trying to stick them with a new paid upgrade every
six to eight months. With version 2, we'll be continuing our
policy of free product support. Much of our competition offers
no phone support, or charges $50 or more per call. We're also
striving to maintain average e-mail response times at 24 hours
or less. This has always been a priority issue for me since I've
personally been on the receiving end of bad customer support
many times. I promised myself to run things differently when I
founded this company ten years ago.
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Web Rank would like to thank Brent Winters for taking the time
to respond to our questions. If you have additional questions
about WebPosition Gold as a result of reading this interview,
please visit the links below, or email WebPosition support staff
via help@webposition.com. If you'd like to trial the Beta
version of WPG v2.0 please download it from the link below.
More: http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=GCU-55EC (home page)
http://www.webposition.com/wpg2upgrade.htm (outline of features
in v2.0) ------------------------------
Copyright © Kalena Jordan 2002
About the author:
Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the
first search engine optimization experts in Australia & New
Zealand and is well known and respected in her field. For more
of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing,
please visit http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com
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