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Thanks for the support, I recommend everybody buys Rank Tracker.

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Thanks for the support, I recommend everybody buys Rank Trac

Wed Oct 31, 2007 1:30 pm

Dave

As all who can do a search on my entries in this forum can tell I am getting no support at all. Here's my story. Please verify by looking at my three postings yourself:

1)My first thread was about how Rank Tracker would not work with Ubuntu. I actually got a response back. A bad response but a response. I was told it was Ubuntu's fault, though I tried the program on both the last release and the most current release of Ubuntu. Instead of pointing fingers you'd think the author would either fix the problem in their own code or write a work around if it really is a problem with Ubuntu.
2)The second thread I didn't start but simply added helpful remarks. I tracked down exactly where the problems in Rank Trackers code surfaced. It took me awhile but I posted my findings in the hopes that it would be fixed. Naively thinking the author of the code would appreciate the work. However I got no response, not even a thanks, though the author continues to post on this forum.
3)The third thread was about how Rank Tracker handles CAPTCHAS. I have quite a few phrases I want to check and after a thousand or so queries google starts questioning whether I'm a human or not. They do this with challenge responses where they say we think you are a robot but if not then write out what you see in the above picture. This is a serious problem which Rank Tracker should address but all I get is silence. After a week of silence on this topic I politely ask again. Again the author replies to other threads but not this serious show-stopper.

Rank Tracker could be a great program. It's much needed. Search engines affect our profits and should be required by law to tell us how we rank on the phrases we consider important. Until the laws are brought up to speed Rank Tracker feels a much needed gap. However people should consider looking for some other tool besides Rank Tracker because of the huge bugs failure to even address these problems...

Re: Poor to no support, don't buy rank tracker

Wed Oct 31, 2007 2:22 pm

LinkAssistant

Hello Dave, I'm really sorry to hear you're unsatisfied with the product and/or our support Sad

Anyway, let's try once again to solve our problem, OK? Thanks... Please find my answers right below...

Dave wrote:

1)My first thread was about how Rank Tracker would not work with Ubuntu. I actually got a response back. A bad response but a response. I was told it was Ubuntu's fault, though I tried the program on both the last release and the most current release of Ubuntu. Instead of pointing fingers you'd think the author would either fix the problem in their own code or write a work around if it really is a problem with Ubuntu.

Dave, let me repeat once again... Maybe you won't like my answer again, but this is true -- the problem is caused by the fact that you're NOT USING OFFICIAL SUN'S JAVA -- you prefer a home-made Ubuntu's Java. Please read Rank Tracker Installation Requirements --here what is written there:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Linux users should visit the http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp page to download and install Sun's Java.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not going to start holy wars whether Ubuntu's implementation of Java is good or bad. The only thing we want to say is that the software is not compatible with any other Java implementations except the Sun's one. So, please simply instal Sun's JRE to avoid this problem in the future.

Dave wrote:

2)The second thread I didn't start but simply added helpful remarks. I tracked down exactly where the problems in Rank Trackers code surfaced. It took me awhile but I posted my findings in the hopes that it would be fixed. Naively thinking the author of the code would appreciate the work. However I got no response, not even a thanks, though the author continues to post on this forum.

We keep trying to reproduce the problem. Dave, please don't think that if I didn't reply to your message, then we intentionally decided to skip it.

Our guys keep trying to reach such a CPU usage in our testing environment. However, we weren't able to do this so far. Sad

I hope you can understand that sometimes it's pretty difficult to reproduce the problem, because Rank Tracker doesn't work alone -- it is being operated by your OS, and your JRE (let alone hardware). Even if just ONE of these components on your computer is slightly different from what we have here, then the situation might NEVER be reproduced.

To say it short: we keep trying to reproduce this problem -- as soon as we are able to do so, we'll prepare a fix as soon as possible.

Dave wrote:

3)The third thread was about how Rank Tracker handles CAPTCHAS. I have quite a few phrases I want to check and after a thousand or so queries google starts questioning whether I'm a human or not. They do this with challenge responses where they say we think you are a robot but if not then write out what you see in the above picture. This is a serious problem which Rank Tracker should address but all I get is silence. After a week of silence on this topic I politely ask again. Again the author replies to other threads but not this serious show-stopper.

Dave, to be honest, this is my personal fault Sad

For some reason I missed out this topic and marked it as *already read and replied* -- this is just a human error, sorry.

Please accept my personal deepest apologies for this.

I will reply to your question right now.

Anyway, Dave, all our team REALLY appreciates your help. We'd also like to thank you for sharing your honest opinion with other users on this forum.

Though we have thoudsands of happy customers all over the world, we're really sorry to hear that you're not satisfied with our work -- that means that we have to work better and better. And in spite of the fact that Rank Tracker can already be called a #1 product in its niche, I promise we'll do our best to make Rank Tracker even better.

Thanks again for your help.
_________________
Search Engine Optimization Software

Wed Oct 31, 2007 3:09 pm

Dave

And it's because you have a great, potentially very very useful, product that I flamed it on your own forum. It's because I really want some solutions because this product is what I've been hoping to find for more than a year.

First off, thank you for your reply. I really do appreciate it.

Now for point one. I think Ubuntu has the lions share of the Linux market. I don't really want to download anything other than what comes as default with the OS. I wish your team would write the code necessary to allow Rank Tracker to work with Ubuntu as is. I view this as a web developer having to code the pages to work with various versions of IE and Firefox. The browsers may not work the same but I don't leave it to the user to find a fix. The implementation of Java may not be exactly the same but a good product attempts to build robust code that works on either.

Second point. I'm glad you are working on it. I filled in the details you asked for. Then found situations it worked at and situations it didn't work at. Seems to me the code spins endlessly maxing out the CPUs whenever M$ or Yahoo reply with a screen response the screen scraper is not expecting. Perhaps you just need to have a few thousand keywords run through Yahoo and M$ to trigger the problem. You don't get the problem with Google.

Thanks for addressing the CAPTCHA problem. I have about 40,000 phrases I'd like to check on a weekly basis. I'm not sure the human emulation would work because that might be too slow. However maybe a proxy using TOR would work. As long as the program knows when to send the query out again and just doesn't list it as not in the top 100. Maybe you could put a quick fix in for a separate category.

The other part, stopping the program and allowing the user to supply the response, might become required. Maybe the queries could be redirected to some site where you have typists that respond and charge 1 cent per reply. Then you could have an account and rules.

Really we should just sue the crap out of these search engines who play God with our businesses. They have a lot of audacity thinking they can capriciously rate us and then tell us we can't even check how they have rated us.

Wed Oct 31, 2007 4:26 pm

BILZ

Dave wrote:

I have about 40,000 phrases I'd like to check on a weekly basis.

Woah! I cant imagine why you would need to check that many keywords. What site are you tracking 40,000 keywords with? And why?
_________________
Washington DC Web Design

Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:02 pm

Dave

About 900 phrases doing business in about 15 communities is almost 15,000 phrases total. Multiply that by 3 search engines and it comes out to about 40K phrases. Maybe I should have said 15K phrases instead of 40K phrases.

Thu Nov 01, 2007 12:43 pm

BILZ

That still sounds like alot. Can you post the URL or PM it? I am curious what kind of site you would want to track that many keywords. I work on nearly 100 different sites and average around 20 keywords each. _________________ Washington DC Web Design

Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:05 pm

Dave

No, I want my privacy.

Here's what I did though. I made a little program to help me find key phrases based on what people actually search for in Overture. Here's how I did it.

1) I started with an obvious keyword for my site and put it into overture.
2) Each of the 100 responses back from Overture I stored in a db as possibilities, I then displayed the phrases one per line with a radio button next to it for yes, no, and maybe.
3) When finished with that page the phrases got updated in the database and each yes phrase was put through Overture again to get a possible 100. The new phrases returned were then added to the next display page for consideration.
4) Every once in a great while I tell it to process all the yes phrases from scratch to see if anything else turns up...

When I had finished all the keywords Overture had discovered for me I had close to 1000. Many of these were clearly typos but if enough people make the same typos it's obvious I should be marketing to them. I also discovered people looking for my products often search on phrases I would never have suspected. However the person doing this routine needs to know the business quite well in order to know what phrases are valid and what are not.

Then each of these phrases I tack on about 15 cities and each of the 15 I submit to each of the search engines.

So you can see
"city1 phrasea"
"city2 phrasea"
....
"city15 phrasea"
"city1 phraseb"
...

So to handle my area, a 30 mile radius, I need to do about 40K queries broken down into about 15K queries per search engine. I'd like to do this on a weekly basis.

These search engine companies want all the profits and none of the responsibilities of being a search engine. If they want to rate us they have to tell us how they rate us. Their TOSs should be taken to court and forced to do things responsibly instead of shafting us all.

Thu Nov 01, 2007 7:08 pm

BILZ

Wow that seems pretty extreme. How do you plan on creating a different page, with unique content, for each keyword? _________________ Washington DC Web Design

Thu Nov 01, 2007 8:04 pm

Dave

I have not figured that out yet. I need to redo the entire website. It will have to be broken out based on something. I can't get my mind around that part yet. It seems like groups within groups. I wish there were clear examples of how people have done this that made obvious sense. It seems there should be some procedural rules to follow...

Fri Nov 02, 2007 3:30 pm

BILZ

Well, you certainly need a good site architecture to organize all the different pages. But creating the content for 15,000 keywords seems overwhelming to me - perhaps impossible. I generally create one page for each keyword - so, that wouldn't be realistic for 15,000 keywords.

A site that I worked on that do a good job of generating content for the 1000's of pages is http://www.maryland-dealer.com/ The difficult part is avoiding duplicate content penalties and getting links to all those pages. http://www.automotive.com/ does a good job of this.
_________________
Washington DC Web Design

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