I'm not sure exactly when this happened (it had to be sometime in the recent past), but SEOmoz has taken away the free Keyword Difficulty tool. This excellent tool is now only available to Premium members ($39/month). Obviously, since I'm not a Premium member, I'm not very happy about that. I've not only lost a tool that I've come to rely upon, but I've lost all the reports I've run in the past. Of course, Rand and his team has every right to monetize their site. After all, they give a HUGE amount back to the SEO community. I really have no beef with this at all, except for the fact that it made me pout. 🙁
Anyway, just a heads up. Don't be surprised if you try to run the Keyword Difficulty tool and get this message:
Keyword Difficulty is limited to premium members
Due to server constraints we are limiting the keyword difficulty tool to Premium Members.
Bah, that just put a cloud on my otherwise sunny day.
That kind of sucks.
On a different topic – I went to Ben Forta’s presentation on Coldfusion 8 last night and as always he did a great job showing it off.
Some nice new features are the new image tag, Breeze integration, AJAX integration, PDF integration, MS Exchange integration (which was really cool!), stuff that I didn’t understand, and stuff that I did understand but can’t remember.
The room was packed with lots of excitement – I think Denver was the 2nd city he has been to on his tour.
Wow, talk about hijacking a thread! LOL. No one can beat Ben Forta when it comes to evangelizing ColdFusion. It’s been so long since I’ve kept up with CF’s latest and greatest, I’m sure there would have been lots that I wouldn’t understand. For example, what the heck is Breeze? LOL. I’ll have to check out the new version and see what’s up.
Donna – We’re just getting a new server to handle some of the load, then the KW Difficulty tool will be back to being available for free as well (though non-members will only be able to run it once per day). It’s, as you can imagine, an incredibly taxing program to run on the system, and was causing our site significant slowdowns, but adding another box should help to fix that.
And the sun comes back out from behind the cloud! 😀
Some months ago I referenced an interest in being a paid member..but haven’t acted on it yet. Seeing this post–well I had the same reaction as Donna; disappointment–but I can’t argue w/ rand’s actions.
I think I’ll go and be a paid member. but glad to know that it is becoming available on a limited basis.
Dave
I ended up purchasing a 1 year subsciption to seomoz.
First of all I like and admire Rand. I admire that he has given back to the seo community in a myriad of ways that expands knowledge.
I also value the ranking and keyword difficulty tool. That tool w/Jim Boykins top ten ranking tool are great ways to analyze the competition and the cost should pay for itself in consultancies.
I also downloaded one of the paid articles. Nice work. I wouldn’t say that you couldn’t find all of that information elsewhere on the web –but I don’t know where I’d find it all in a comprehensive, organized single source.
My suggestion would be that articles need to be updated in so far as the engines (especially Google) update and change things.
Anyways glad the source is back up for test runs. It is one of the better tools on the web IMHO.
Dave