As you may have already known, the Google SOAP API key that powered the Digital Point keyword tracker and many other keyword ranking tools on the web was discontinued by Google on August 31st 2009. Immediately there was a frenzy on the Digital Point forums about this. Digital Point owner Shawn Hogan was quick to jump on the scene and said he would be looking for a fix as soon as possible.

Well, that time came on October 10th 2009 when Shawn announced that the tool now worked with Google once again, and now included support for Bing results as well. This is a pretty great update considering he killed 2 birds with 1 stone and fixed issues for both APIs. I have actually tested the tool with a list of 800+ keywords already and it worked great, even much better than the old SOAP API in terms of speed. Great job Shawn!

Since there is no SOAP API key anymore, the tool now uses the Advanced Usage Script that used to be used to power the Yahoo results within the tool. The new script is available once you login to your keyword tracker account. The new script does require PHP 5.2 or higher to run properly, and I hear that isn't the case on many shared hosting platforms.

This is great news for members of the Digital Point community who haven't been able to use the tool for checking their Google rankings before, as Google has stopped giving out SOAP API keys years ago. If you were one of the lucky ones to get one in that time frame, or happened to be able to find one on the web that wasn't being used anymore, you had a great tool in your toolbox. Those that didn't have one were left to go looking for alternatives. Most of which only track a few keywords, and others are not free.

One drawback to the tool is that it only checks results within the top 20, but hey, it's a free tool. I will be putting together a post about what other options are out there for tracking keyword rankings, but I will have to say that sadly this is one of the only free ones left. Once again great job by Shawn to bring his tool back online for the community. Now if we could just get Overture out of the Keyword Suggestion tool, and something else useful in it's place.