August 3rd Mozscape Index Update (our largest index, but nearly a monthly late)
-
Update 5:27pm 8/4 - the data in Open Site Explorer is up-to-date, as is the API and Mozbar. Moz Analytics campaigns are currently loading in the new data, and all campaigns should be fully up-to-date by 4-10pm tomorrow (8/5). However, your campaign may have the new data much earlier as it depends on where that campaign falls in the update ordering.
Hey gang,
I wanted to provide some transparency into the latest index update, as well as give some information about our plans going forward with future indices.
The Good News: This index, now that it's delivered, is pretty impressive.
- Mozscape's August index is 407 Billion URLs in size, nearly 100 Billion (~25%) bigger than our last record index size. We indexed 2.18 trillion links for the first time ever (prior record was 1.54 trillion).
- Correlations for Page Authority have gone up from 0.319 to 0.333 in the latest index, suggesting that we're getting a slightly more accurate representation of Google's use of links in rankings from this data (DA correlations remain constant at 0.185)
- Our hit ratio for URLs in Google's SERPs has gone up considerably, from 69.97% in our previous index to 78.66% in the August update. This indicates we are crawling and indexing more of what Google shows in the search results (a good benchmark for us). Note that a large portion of what's missing will be things published in the last 30-60 days while we were processing the index (after crawling had stopped).
The Bad News: August's index was late by ~25 days.
We know that reliable, consistent, on-time Mozscape updates are critically important to everyone who uses Moz's products. We've been working hard for years to get these to a better place, but have struggled mightily. Our latest string of failures was completely new to the team - a bunch of problems and issues we've never seen before (some due to the index size, but many due to odd things like a massive group of what appear to be spam domains using the Palau TLD extension clogging up crawl/processing, large chunks of pages we crawled with 10s of thousands of links which slow down the MozRank calculations, etc). While there's no excuse for delays, and we don't want to pass these off as such, we do want to be transparent about why we were so late.
Our future plans include scaling back the index sizes a bit, dealing with the issues around spam domains, large link-list pages, some of the odd patterns we see in .pl and .cn domains, and taking one extra person from the Big Data team off of work on the new index system (which will be much larger and real-time rather than updated every 30 days) to help with Mozscape indices. We believe these efforts, and the new monitoring systems we've got will help us get better at producing high quality, consistent indices.
Question everyone always asks: Why did my PA/DA change?!
There are tons of reasons why these can change, and they don't necessarily mean anything bad about your site, your SEO efforts, or whether your links are helping you rank. PA and DA are predictive, correlated metrics that say nothing about how you're actually performing. They merely map better than most metrics to Google's global rankings across large SERP sets (but not necessarily your SERPs, which is what you should care about).
That said, here's some of the reasons PA/DA do shift:
- The domains/pages with the highest PA/DA scores gain even faster than most of the domains below them, making it harder each index to get higher scores (since PA/DA are on a logarithmic scale, this is smoothed out somewhat - it would be much worse on a conventional scale, e.g. Facebook.com 100, everyone else 0.0003).
- Google's ranking algorithm introduces new elements, changes, modifies what they care about, etc.
- Moz crawls a set of the web that does or doesn't include the pages that are more likely to point to a given domain than another. Although our crawl tends to be representative, if you've got lots of links from deep pages on less popular domains in a part of the web far from the mainstream, we may not consistently crawl those well (or, we could overcrawl your sector because it recently received powerful links from the center of the web).
My advice, as always, is to use PA/DA as relative scores. If your scores are falling, but your competitors' are falling more, that's not a bad thing. If your scores are rising, but your competitors' are rising faster, they're probably gaining ground on you. And, if you're talking about score changes in the 1-4 points range, that's not necessarily anything but noise. PA/DA scores often shift 1-4 points up or down in a new index so don't sweat it!
Let me know if you've got more questions and I'll do my best to answer. You can also refer to the API update page here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates
-
Rand, I've emailed you. Thx
-
Where are you seeing that? In OSE? Or in Moz Analytics? In Moz Analytics, it's possible that it's still cached, and will be updating (a few thousand campaigns each hour, so not too long until all of them are done), but in OSE, that data should absolutely be new. If not, can you send an email to me - rand at moz dot com - with your sites, and I'll ask the Big Data team to look into it.
-
Hi Rand, I'm still seeing 9 June in my campaigns and no updated data....or missing data. Not fixed here yet.
-
Yup - I'm seeing the same team. Have let our engineers know - hopefully they can sort it out and fix soon.
-
Rand, I'm seeing some seriously weird data on many of our sites. Crazy Euro links that go nowhere...that definitely aren't meant to be there, and link totals that don't add up.
-
I'm seeing some odd ones too that appear not to have updated. Pinging the team as it shouldn't usually take this long for data to update.
-
Update:
some of the sites we are tracking have data in them but it's still from 9 June. The rest are showing incorrect / corrupted links or no links at all.
Conclusion: there is something seriously wrong with the MozScape update for us.
-
Hey Sticky! It takes about 24-48 hours for new index information to be submitted to Moz Campaigns anytime a new Mozscape Index is released. By checking your domain directly on OSE (moz.com/researchtools/ose) you will be able to see your data—and more—before campaigns are updated. This may be slightly delayed as we are building monthly data for all campaigns which we run on the 1st of each month. Generally our index updates are rarely released near the beginning of the month which would not interfere with normal campaign updates.
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions!
-
It is working on most sites, but a few I have just checked have changed, ie one started at 27 - 5 hours ago was 32 now 30! So might give it another 24 hours to settle down.
-
Glad it is working for you. I'm still seeing last Index, and in some cases no data.
-
I had to re-fresh a few pages, a few times, but all the data has come though now. Every website up, though a few by only 4, but I am still hopeful that is not noise but the result of hard work.
-
I'm wondering why I can't see the updated MozScape data in my account? It still says next index 9 June and the data still appears to be old (and / or incomplete). Any advice?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Location Data Batch Updates via the MOZ API
According to the MOZ API documentation, I am able to update multiple Locations in a batch in order to create or update their location data, currently 130 locations. I have successfully created a batch and the API returned the $id, as I expected. Yet, it doesn't make clear how the multiple locations I want to update are supposed to be sent back to the API. I was expecting an upload of a CSV file or JSON data, and not Query Parameter as noted in the docs. When including a JSON file, properly formatted, as a binary upload, the response is still expecting a locations parameter. See error here: { "status":"MISSING_PARAMETER", "message":"locations missing. ", "response": { "locations":"MISSING_PARAMETER" } } https://moz.com/developers/docs/local/api#_api_batch__id-PATCH
API | | yuca.pro1 -
Sitemaps and Indexed Pages
Hi guys, I created an XML sitemap and submitted it for my client last month. Now the developer of the site has also been messing around with a few things. I've noticed on my Moz site crawl that indexed pages have dropped significantly. Before I put my foot in it, I need to figure out if submitting the sitemap has caused this.. can a sitemap reduce the pages indexed? Thanks David. TInSM
API | | Slumberjac0 -
Why does OSE show old data (Previous update results)?
Moz api started to show July 13 update results for my website. I checked it 2 days ago and saw all new established links and updated DA PA for July 27 update. But last 2 days both Moz Api and OSE main page show July 13 update results. Is there a maintenance or mismatching error between old and new databases?
API | | cozmic0 -
Ranking Drop for August 2016
We've been working our way back after all Google's been doing this year. We'd been sitting in the 30s most of the year, but even with some improvement in keywords as well as backlinks, we just dropped from 31 to 26. Is there a way to find a report or at least some insight as to why we dropped 6?
API | | kkenyon1 -
Why did the April Index Raise DA?
All of our websites DA raised dramatically, including the competitors we track Any idea why this may have happened across the board?
API | | Blue_Compass0 -
The April Index Update is Here!
Don’t adjust your monitors, or think this is an elaborate April Fool’s joke, we are actually releasing our April Index Update EARLY! We had planned to release our April Index Update on the 6th, but processing went incredibly smoothly and left us the ability to get it up today. Let’s dig into the details of the April Index Release: 138,919,156,028 (139 billion) URLs. 746,834,537 (747 million) subdomains. 190,170,132 (190 million) root domains. 1,116,945,451,603 (1.1 Trillion) links. Followed vs nofollowed links 3.02% of all links found were nofollowed 61.79% of nofollowed links are internal 38.21% are external Rel canonical: 28.14% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag The average page has 90 links on it 73 internal links on average. 17 external links on average. Don’t let me hold you up, go dive into the data! PS - For any questions about DA/PA fluctuations (or non-fluctuations) check out this Q&A thread from Rand:https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores
API | | IanWatson9 -
Lost many links and keyword ranks since moz index update
Hi All, I came back from work today from a week off to find my site has gone from 681 external inbound links to 202. With this my domain authority, moz trust and moz rank have all also taken a slip. Compounding this, I am seeing a slip most of my keywords rankings. If i try to use the open site explorer to explore my links and see what going on i get the message It looks like we haven't discovered link data for this site or URL. If i check the just discovered links like it suggests I get It looks like there's no Just-Discovered Links data for this URL yet. I know these features worked before the index as i used them. Is this all attributable to the moz index issues that have been noted or could something have happened to my site? Since i started 2 months ago I have made many changes including... Updating the site map that was 4 years out of date and included 400 broken urls Removed blank pages and other useless webpages on the site that contained no content (from the previous administrator) Edited a few pages content from keyword spammy stuff to nicely written and relevant content Fixed url rewrites that made loops and un-accessible product pages All these changes should be for the better but the latest readings have me a little worried. Thanks.
API | | ATP0 -
Suggestion - Should OSE include "citation links" within its index?
This is really a suggestion (and debate to see if people agree with me), with regard to including "citation links" within Moz tools, by default, as just another type of link NOTE: when I am talking about "citation links" I am talking about a link that is not wrapped in a link tag and is therefore non clickable, eg moz.com Obviously Moz have released the mentions tool, which is great, and also FWE which is also great. However, it would seem to me that they are missing a trick in that "citation links" don't feature in the main link index at all. We know that Google as a minimum uses them as an indicator to crawl a page ( http://ignitevisibility.com/google-confirms-url-citations-can-help-pages-get-indexed/ ), and also that they don't pass page rank - HOWEVER, you would assume that google does use then as part of their alogrithm in some manner as they do nofollow links. It would seem to me that a "Citation Link" could (possibly) be deemed more important than a no follow link in Googles alogrithm, as a "no follow" link is a clear indication by the site owner that they don't fully trust the link, but a citation link would neither indicate trust or non trust. So - my request is to get "citation links" into the main link index (and the Just Discovered index for that matter). Would others agree??
API | | James770