Using the Google AJAX Search API for SEO Purposes

Question

I am looking at writing a .net application that uses the Google AJAX Search API to determine where our website falls for a given term compared to a competitor.

I can find alot about the old SOAP API however for the new AJAX api I cannot find any information on the following:

• Is this sort of use allowed as the Terms of use are vague
• Is there a limit to the number of requests per day
• As you can only get a max of 8 results at a time, is the only way to get the top 100 results to keep requesting the next set and is this an issue?

Thanks

Answer 1

This will be a violation of Google's ToS, but a lot of apps out there doing that so it's your call as they say.

There is no set limit, but google does ban IP's based on heavy usage. You would want to either:

• Throttle requests(one per 1-5 seconds is relatively safe from my experience)
• Use proxies to query google from multiple IP's(risking on get IP blocked though)
• Use Anonymizing services that will proxy your request through their pool of IP addresses(there is one good one but I unfortunately forgot what they called). This could be a bit pricey though.

Generally if you just want to keep track of your own ranking I recommend using Advanced Web Ranking application, it does it very well, and is pretty much industry standard for rank tracking.