A note from Rob:
I’m pleased to say that we have officially put this issue to bed. After rolling out our fix mid-month, we have enjoyed a week of fully refreshed, daily data, and we are confident that everything will remain stabilized.
While depending on Google comes with a level of risk that we typically take in stride, I want you to know that we don’t consider the impact of this latest change to be business-as-usual. You count on us to deliver data that is critical to your success in a reliable and timely manner and we faltered in our execution of that.
This was a huge learning experience for us, and in order to prevent something like this from happening again, we plan to improve the resiliency of our data collection systems. We will:
- Upgrade our crawl to boost capacity and include a higher degree of redundancy to absorb delays.
- Maintain a healthy surplus of IPs at all times.
- Advance our real-time analysis of crawl behaviour to identify anomalies earlier.
- Refine STAT to deal more gracefully with parsing bugs and interruptions.
On top of that, we’re committing to more regular risk analysis and scenario planning for all critical components of our infrastructure.
I want to thank you again for your patience and understanding — it has allowed us to reach the best possible solution and learn along the way. If you have any concerns that you would like addressed, I encourage you to reach out to support@getSTAT.com.
All the best,
Rob, STAT CEO
[UPDATED] January 23, 2018
Late last week we began unrolling our final fix for this issue and saw increasing completion rates over the weekend. Today, we’re beyond happy to report that your data will once again be updating daily — this means no more waiting for fresh rankings.
If you were impacted by delayed data, you may see some initial fluctuations in your metrics as we return to a daily cycle for all keywords.
We’ll be monitoring everything closely over the next few days and ironing out any kinks that may present themselves. If you’re still seeing anything out of the ordinary, please let us know at support@getSTAT.com.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team
[UPDATED] January 12, 2018
We’re continuing to make good progress on this issue and are working hard towards having everything back to normal for you over the next few weeks. We are extra grateful for your ongoing patience. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@getSTAT.com if you’d like to chat.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team
[UPDATED] January 3, 2018
We are pleased to say that we’ve made significant progress over the holidays in response to the changes Google made in mid-December.
By adjusting its requirements for IP addresses, Google made it difficult for us and other SERP tracking providers to crawl SERPs as usual, and it now requires us to operate specific IP ranges within markets all over the world.
We’ve had good success finding reliable IPs and making the necessary infrastructure updates, and are now rolling out changes one market at a time. We started with the US — as it makes up our largest number of tracked keywords — and are nearing a 100 percent daily completion rate. We expect GB results to stabilize within the next week, followed by Australia, and then the rest of the world. As we work through these rollouts, you may notice that your rankings take up to 48 hours to complete.
We want to apologize again for any frustrations this is causing, and we thank you for your continued patience while we work through the issue. Please do reach out to us at support@getSTAT.com if you have any questions regarding your data. We will continue to update you on our progress.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team
[UPDATED] December 20, 2017
We’re still working away like Santa’s elves to update our infrastructure, which means you’ll still experience some inconsistencies in your data. A notable issue is with the Ranking Change column, which is not functioning as usual and is displaying a “0.”
We appreciate your patience while we complete our updates and apologize for any inconvenience it might cause. As always, feel free to contact us at support@getSTAT.com if you have any questions or concerns.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team
[NOTICE] December 15, 2017
We’re in the midst of infrastructure updates thanks to a recent Google change, and as a result, you may see some inconsistencies in your data.
Our office will be closed from December 18 to January 1, but our dev team is staying on to get things up to snuff as quickly as possible. As always, please feel free to reach out to support@getSTAT.com if you have any questions. We’ll all be checking our emails during the break, but may take a little longer than usual to respond.
Cheers,
Derek and the STAT team