The very popular and one of the best SEO Keyword Research Tool Market Samurai has been hit by some serious performance issues lately, mainly it’s popular Rank Tracker Tool.
Here’s the link to a very interesting article by Eugene Ware over at Noble Samurai regarding the future of Market Samurai.
Eugene also mentions that Google has made some significant technical changes recently, and this has affected Market Samurai’s ability to collect data.
After reading through the article it seems that most of the features of Market Samurai will soon be running fine, with the exception of the Rank Tracker Tool. Prior to the problems with Market Samurai’s Rank tracker, you could enter as many of your target keywords as you wished.
You could then check those targeted keywords by setting your search depth up to around 1000 places in Google search.(to see where your related webpages rank).
How Will These Changes Affect Market Samurai Users?
Now you can only use around ten keywords at a time(maximum suggested by Noble Samurai staff) and you can only check with a search depth of 100 places in Google search.
Another important factor that is mentioned in the article is that, the Market Samurai Rank Tracker Module is set to become a paid tool on it’s own(A monthly payment) if you wish to have the fully functional version of this module(similar to or better than the original Rank Tracker before the current problems)
Though the monthly charges have not been made clear, there are many Market Samurai users(Who paid the one off payment to purchase the software) who are now very upset by this announcement.
Market Samurai Users Are Voicing Their Opinions
There are some very strong views out on the web regarding this major change to the Market Samurai Software. Many people have said that the change to a monthly charge for using the Rank Tracker Feature, is just a money making scam by the makers of the Market Samurai Software.
Others webmasters, Internet Marketers, etc who use Market Samurai are still happy to use the software either opting to use a different tool to do their rank tracking or pay the monthly charge for using Market Samurai’s updated Rank Tracking tool(When it’s finally released).
For me personally, being a paid user of Market Samurai I will just continue to use the other Modules in Market Samurai and possibly use their free limited rank tracker tool(If they provide one) or just go and use another tool to check my Keyword and related page Rankings.
I find Market Samurai to be very helpful for what I need to do, so I can still get plenty of quality usage from the software.
I had been using the Market Samurai Rank Tracker Module nearly every day, prior to these problems.
To be quite honest some of the data(rankings) were very accurate, other times I was told I was ranking for keywords that I could not find in the Google search results.
The best advice I can give is to use a variety of tools both free and paid, so you can then measure the results and see which combination of tools works best for you.
I currently spend a lot of time using the free Google keyword tool combined with Market Samurai.
I also check data from SEO book, SEOQuake, Semrush, Search Status and on occasion the free tools provided from the SEO Powersuite.
There are also many other SEO and Keyword research tools out there, both free and paid.
What are your thoughts about the changes to Market Samurai?
Daniel.