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Congrats Rob! Enjoyed following his various posts and presentations about HitTail. I suspect this is the listing for the sale on FE International: http://fei

Congrats Rob! Enjoyed following his various posts and presentations about HitTail. I suspect this is the listing for the sale on FE International: http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/5262-saas-keyword-tool-9-years-old-73k-net-mo http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/5262-saas-keyword-t... I'd also be curious if Google's recent updates ("not provided" keywords in analytics, etc.) have impacted the ability to make this an effective product in the long run.

ThomasSmale 11y ago
Thomas from FE International here. That's the right link. HitTail uses Webmaster Tools (Search Console) rather than Google Analytics so the product still works fine - I tested it myself before we listed the business and found it very helpful!
- deleted 11y ago
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  - ThomasSmale 11y ago
    I believe it goes back 999 of the top keywords so plenty of data for the tool to be practical. It's useful for people with sites to come up with a reasonable number of content suggestions each week/month. It's probably not suitable if you're looking to do a huge volume, but I suspect that wasn't the original purpose nor what the majority of users need.
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dangrossman 11y ago
No doubt the long-term outlook of this product has changed dramatically since its initial conception and the 2011 acquisition. It's an analysis and recommendation engine built on search data for each site. That data used to be directly available to and collected by HitTail, since search terms were in the referring URLs of every visit to the site coming from a search engine. Now that Google virtually never includes search terms in referring URLs, the only way HitTail can get the data it needs is via Google's APIs. Google can change the API, remove the API, or change the terms of use, and HitTail's SOL. Already they only have access to a subset of search data the API makes available, rather than all long-tail keywords, which they had a few years ago. Will Google remain friendly to tools like this in the future? Who knows. That's a risk the new owner hopefully evaluated before taking it on.
- j45 11y ago
  I believe HitTail has it's own history of terms it's collected over the years before google took it off the table

ThomasSmale 11y ago

Thomas from FE International here. That's the right link. HitTail uses Webmaster Tools (Search Console) rather than Google Analytics so the product still works fine - I tested it myself before we listed the business and found it very helpful!

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- ThomasSmale 11y ago
  I believe it goes back 999 of the top keywords so plenty of data for the tool to be practical. It's useful for people with sites to come up with a reasonable number of content suggestions each week/month. It's probably not suitable if you're looking to do a huge volume, but I suspect that wasn't the original purpose nor what the majority of users need.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dangrossman 11y ago

No doubt the long-term outlook of this product has changed dramatically since its initial conception and the 2011 acquisition. It's an analysis and recommendation engine built on search data for each site. That data used to be directly available to and collected by HitTail, since search terms were in the referring URLs of every visit to the site coming from a search engine. Now that Google virtually never includes search terms in referring URLs, the only way HitTail can get the data it needs is via Google's APIs. Google can change the API, remove the API, or change the terms of use, and HitTail's SOL. Already they only have access to a subset of search data the API makes available, rather than all long-tail keywords, which they had a few years ago. Will Google remain friendly to tools like this in the future? Who knows. That's a risk the new owner hopefully evaluated before taking it on.

j45 11y ago
I believe HitTail has it's own history of terms it's collected over the years before google took it off the table