Last week, there was a big commotion about the death of the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. Basically some well known and respected individuals took it upon themselves to announce that the tool was no longer alive.
The word spread like wildfire, and everyone panicked, especially since the majority of desktop keyword research tools relied on the the Overture free tool.
It turns out that the obituary was a bit premature, Overture is still running as we speak. It seems that it was just simply overwhelmed by its own popularity and the servers were occasionally (often) timing out. Now, it seems to be working better than ever, probably because some of the desktop tools found other ways to get the data they needed.
In addition, during the panic, due to the misinformation in part, some quick on their feet entrepreneurs developed alternatives for the “dead” Overture tool. In particular, Wordtracker, one of the most popular paid services, developed a free Wordtracker tool.
There are several lessons to be learned:
1. If you’re a software developer, don’t tie your software into something that you have no control over.
2. If you’re a software buyer, don’t buy something where the the author has ignored lesson 1.
3. Don’t panic and don’t spread misinformation until you’ve verified the information completely. There were several “gurus” whose reputations that they had spent years building took a big hit when they went into the streets yelling “the king is dead, the king is dead”.
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