Awkward: Google Asks Moz How It Gets Its Ranking Data

This is funny and awkward at the same time. Dr. Pete from Moz was excited to share that Moz rebuilt its rank tracking software and posted about it on Twitter. John Mueller from Google asked Pete "How do you pull the rankings?" It got super awkward very quickly.

Here are those tweets:

How do you pull the rankings? — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 3, 2019

Dr. Pete replies in a PC way:

Let me put it this way -- the new tool represents no change in how we gather ranking data. — Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) October 3, 2019

Rand then goes after John saying the same way Google does:

Same way your employer does. And honestly, would be great if you were an equal opportunity down-puncher on this stuff. — Rand Fishkin (@randfish) October 4, 2019

But Google does have a robots.txt say no crawling and Moz I guess does not respect that?

The Twitter thread is pretty funny and I doubt Google will do anything at this point to stop Moz or other tools from doing this. They have done things in the past but Google generally turns the other way with these things.

Forum discussion at Twitter.