Why there is no even close correlation between MajesticSEO data and Open Site? Explorer?
-
I compared my site home page against my competitor homepage with Open Site Explorer and I found that according Open Site Explorer I have only 3 backlinks where in MajesticSEO I have more than 100 backlinks in 'Historic' data and more 90 in '30 days fresh data'.
Why there is no even close correlation between MajesticSEO data and Open Site Explorer?
How SEOMoz count backlinks?
-
What's so awesome about a fresh index when it thoroughly confuses the issue (includes dupes from weird sessionIDs/URL parameters, etc). If MajesticSEO isn't showing accurate link count numbers, I have no use for it.
Mike Corso
Cool Site of the Day
The Internet's Oldest Directory
http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com -
We did a bunch of work on this a while back, so my stats are probably not up to date (I think around October of 2010). Basically, we compared Yahoo! Site Explorer numbers, Google numbers (via the crappy but somewhat proportional link: command), Exalead, SEOmoz, Majestic and Alexa.
Majestic was definitely odd and so was Alexa. Neither of those two mapped/correlated well to the quantities reported by the others. Thus, for example, if xyz.com has:
- 50 links according to Google
- 1,000 links according to Yahoo!
- 500 links according to SEOmoz (Linkscape/OSE)
And site abc.com has:
- 100 links according to Google
- 2,000 links according to Yahoo!
- 1,000 links according to SEOmoz (Linkscape/OSE)
The percentages of quantity will match up fairly well for these, but not for Majestic (e.g. they might show 5,000 links for xyz.com and 3,500 for site abc.com).
This is a bit odd, but we don't know exactly why. They crawl a ton more links than even what Google/Yahoo!/Bing reportedly do, which could be part of it, but my best guess is the canonicalization and freshness issues. Since MJ crawls the web all the time, and doesn't build "indices" every X time period (like Google/Yahoo!/Bing/Linkscape), but rather maintains a single consistent link index to which new sites/links are added, the data structures may be different.
Majestic also appears, at least to us, to do far less canonicalization, removal of unnecessary URL parameters, etc. Thus, if one site links from 50,000 pages due to weird session IDs in the URL, that might bias the crawl and link count, but standard canonicalization will normalize these.
I really don't mean to bash on a competitor - MJ's fresh index is awesome, their tools are good, and a ton of SEO folks find them useful, including myself. But, on the index matching and link count numbers, we definitely see this same weirdness that many other SEOs do.
Hope that helps!
-
Opensiteexplorer more or less takes a representative random sample of the available links. More prominent links have a tendency to be visible on opensiteexplorer rather than majestic seo. Also check out yahoo links.
-
Can you provide the site url?
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
-
Why would a newly created site, have ranked ahead of our site for keyword that we are optimized for?
This newly created site has a DA of 1 and PA of 1, no backlinks, no optimized urls, the keyword they ranked better than us on was listed a total of 6 times on the homepage. Our PA is 29 and DA is 18 for the page that ranks for this keyword. They really copied a few elements of our site but made sure to change a few things, but also list at the bottom of their site 5 keywords that are crucial to our niche industry but they're all linking to the same page. Any ideas? It's an SEO guy running the site, we've watched them toy with adwords trying to be number 1, but not liking the price, so they are here and there with it. Mainly I don't see why they'd rank better for this keyword, we our site have prolly 500% more content that's both of quality and relevance to our customers, in the form of Pdfs, infographics, help sections, and video. Very baffled here, any advice would rock!
Competitive Research | | Deacyde1 -
Tool to scrape data from Homedepot,ebay,amazon.
Does anybody know about a tool that you can use to aggregate data about the best seller products in categories for major retailers in USA? I did find a couple not so good tools for amazon and even ebay but retailers like walmart and homedepot are left out.
Competitive Research | | Harveyspecter0 -
Why is the Site indexed?
Hi, I'm trying to test a few things for which I've registered and set up new domains. For the set up I used Wordpress. Each Site has about three articles in it but no links pointing to them. Also I didn't take any measures to get my site indexed. However, one week later all my sites were indexed. Why is that and how can it be? I'm thankful for any answer since the problem is really ruining my test environment. The only clue I have, as to why this could be happening, is that I didn't remove the ping sites.Is that the reason? Or are there also other reasons? Thanks
Competitive Research | | Windex0 -
Another how the *%#^ is this site ranking question
I saw a question posted by someone a while back asking how a certain (in their opinion crappy) site was ranking in the top then. It happened that there were some good reasons for that site ranking. Well.... I have stumbled on a site that seems to be ranking for (almost) no reason at all: relatively low DA/PA very few inbound links (none seem to be that special) thin content The only thing I can think of, is that the site has the keyword in the domain name. But looking at the search results, there are other domains with exact match keyword in URL and somewhat stronger metrics that don't rank.
Competitive Research | | inhouseseo0 -
Open Site Explorer Twitter and Facebook Links
I was using Open Site Explorer to compare some of my site's links to a competitor and I noticed that my Twitter page is not counting as an incoming link, whereas theirs are. From what I can tell, we have the same kind of setup on my twitter page, listing the domain in the company information... but no luck. Any suggestions on what I may be able to change? For reference: twitter.com/mediamegamall ... I know I need to work on the twitter presence... one thing at a time 🙂
Competitive Research | | Ask_MMM0 -
Any chance to out rank Google flight data for company name?
If you search any number with "co" after it you get Continental Airlines flight information of the corresponding number. So you if you search "4co" you get the current flight details for Continental flight 4. Is there any chance if you have a company called 4CO and you own 4co.com that you could get the number one spot for that term or will google flight results always trump the "organic" results? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | 2comarketing0 -
Should I link to this site or is it too spammy?
Hi all, I've been asked if I want to exchange links with http://www.myteetimesonline.com/ and I'm tempted but fearful that its link profile looks spammy. What do you guys think? I'm basically starting from scratch with my own site http://www.golfgear4you.com and have a Page Rank 0 and Domain authority 32. The guys that want to link to me are Page Rank 3 but Domain authority 35. Their content would be of interest to my site's users and vice versa but my biggest concern is their link profile looks awful because the sites that link to them don't appear to be very relevant. I've done a lot of reading on this and have found the resources on this site to be a goldmine. The generally message is avoid easy links to spammy sites because they could hurt credibility. I just want to check I've actually learnt something and my instincts about this site are correct. i.e leave it alone!! Thanks, Andy
Competitive Research | | getzen560 -
IP Address Of Site
Hi there, really new to seo and loving being able to research everything on seo moz. I have a question about the ip address of my site: I use a company that sells templated real estate websites (I'm a realtor) and I'm noticing all of their websites show as having the same ip address. There are probably 100's of sites on their server targeting the same keywords as I am, would this affect my ranking at all? I'm just considering switching to a Wordpress site with a unique IP address, so I'm curious to find out how the seomoz members would answer this question. Cheers, Adrian
Competitive Research | | adrianaldous0