Open Site Explorer.. Bit of a let down?
-
Hi, not too sure if this is a discussion or rant!?
I’ve been following SEOMoz for a couple of years now. Testing their tools, reading their blogs, sharing their content, and watching the whiteboard Friday videos (massive thumbs up to that one!). They are at the top of the game, no argument there.
Although I should have done so much earlier, I have eventually signed up to the pro version and am about to migrate all my clients over. But there is one major caveat which I’m not sure should exist.. Open Site Explorer.
Don’t get me wrong, OSE provides invaluable metrics, some that no other ‘crawler’ provides, but it is far from perfect, there are things that we SEO’s need, and are hoping to get!
Some feature SEOMoz could add;
- Ability to view a chart of ‘link types’ (i.e. blog post, social media, Press Release etc..) – Linkdex do this!
- Utilise a ‘fresh‘ backlink index as Majestic SEO do. ( we do use majestic alongside SEOMoz)
- Crawl more frequently – enough said!
- Index all ‘not so good’ backlinks – this will help identify what backlinks AREN’T helping.
I realise this is a lot easier said than done, and I’m sure SEOMoz are working on solutions.. just can’t wait till they launch!
What do you think? IS OSE more than it’s cracked up to be? Could it be improved? Let me know
Lee
-
Wow Rand, thanks for such a detailed and frank answer, I now have a better understanding of the issues you face.. it's much more complex than I imagined. Great to see that you''re doing all you can, look forward to the improvements.
Have a great week! Lee
-
Hi Lee - thanks for bringing these up! I'll try to answer with regards to each of the items you've mentioned:
#1 - This is very tough at our scale (literally 1 trillion+ links, and in the latest index about to launch, 150 billion+ pages across nearly 200 million domains). However, you're correct that we're working towards a classification system that will lean on some seeding + machine learning + user input. I'd suspect 12-18 months before we can launch it, though.
#2 - This is not currently in the plans, at least not at full web scale. We will have Blogscape back up and running soon, and that crawls ~10mm+ fresh sources daily, so if you have a link/mention on a blog/forum/news site with any notoriety, we should be catching those and updating hopefully every 6-8 hours. Mozscape (aka Linkscape, our full web index), will continue to be at least 2-4 weeks between updates and will require 3-4 weeks of processing. We're trying some new things on the technology side, but it's a huge challenge to get to Google's scale and keep our metrics, sorting, views, etc. Majestic can do this with their index because they simply export links directly into the consummable portion of the app, but it limits the sorting/views/filters and ability to generate high quality metrics like PA/DA/mozRank/etc.
#3 - Yup. Definitely agree and working on it. We're trying some new hardware stuff, new parallelization of processing and everything under the sun to make it work.
#4 - Our next index will probably have a lot more of this (and we'll be watching carefully to see how this performs for our customers). We're also working to build a spam score that maps against what we've seen Google penalize/ban over time (currently doing a bunch of research there), so you can get a good sense of what things are likely to be hit over time.
Mozscape/OSE is a huge priority for us and we have 7 extremely talented folks working night and day (and a lot of weekends) to improve this. In the next 3-6 months, it will get massively better than it is today - the next new index is only a few days away now, and after that, we shouldn't ever have such a long period without an update (this round was an impossibly hard-to-fathom confluence of problems that we've taken many steps to prevent from ever happening again).
Thanks for your patience and the good questions.
-
Ignore the last reply John, have just tested Link Detective on a site that I know the link backlink profile of.. it's massively inaccurate! The tool simply isn't able to identify correct link types as they suggest. Dissapointing!
-
I've read they would be indexing 2 x the data Anthony, not 3 x. Suppose there must be some confusion out there, fingers crossed it's 3 x the data!
-
Cheers John, will take a look when I get the chance.. have you used it before? Is it accurate?
Enjoy the weekend! Lee
-
Thanks for all the feedback guys, would be good to hear SEOMoz's official stance on this!
-
You might find this tool helpful to analyse your downloaded report from OSE
http://www.linkdetective.com/
-
I have to agree with Kevin on this one...
Items 2,3,and 4 are days away.
Does it suck that OSE's Linkscape Index hasn't been updated since the end of February? YEP!
Will it be worth the wait next week when it is updated and contains three times the data as the previous crawls? YEP!
I consider SEOMoz a community, and though Linkscape's stagnant data is causing some issues, I realize that once those issues are resolved that I'll be getting more bang for my buck than I did before, and I'm totally willing to struggle for a month in order to have better tools at my disposal for many months to come.
Rand and SEOMoz are drastically improving the volume of data that we will have at our disposal. That takes time and resources. They aren't raising prices or making excuses, they're working out bugs and improving the service. I'll take it.
Anthony
-
Lee,
First, I need to say I
OSE - it's invaluable in my forensic audit work. Having said that, I would LOVE to see the "link types" chart. The biggest challenge I expect they'd face in that is properly detecting where a link is on a page, or what class to put it in due to how unspectacular code consistency really is across the vast web. For example, I've seen others attempt this and fail miserably ( what should be identified as a sidebar (blogroll type) link is often seen as something else, and what should be seen as a main content area link is often seen as a sidebar link (too many WP themes for example, label their main content area divs as "sidebar2" for example).
And that just gets worse / more challenging when the need comes in identifying if a site is really a blog, or some other site that happens to use WordPress as it's platform.
Having said all that, I would be in heaven if the Moz team could get that data into OSE
-
From following all the talk, I'm pretty sure they are working on points 2, 3 & 4.
While all that is good, I personally feel they should concentrate on updating more often first, then move towards giving those extra features. The two month stretch between updates has been a real pain in the ass. But I'm sure they know that.
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
-
Can we disavow all spammy looking sites in OSE with a spam score of 5 or above?
Hello, We'd like to use OSE to make a disavow list. Can we just go through everything with a spam score of 5 or higher that looks like spam when we visit the site and disavow all of them? I'll be using Moz pro, are there any other free tools that I can utilize? What do I keep in mind? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
When do the "just discovered" links on Open Site Explorer count?
I have been working hard to get follow backlinks but they have all been in the Just Discovered part of Open Site Explorer for a long time. So they don't count in my stats for Domain Authority and such. When do they move OUT of Just Discovered?
Moz Pro | | dealblogger0 -
How can I get a report of the top 500 national sites using Domain Authority and Page Authority? Does someone have to type sites in one by one on Site Explorer or is there another way?
I want to know what sites and blogs have the to rankings overall based on their Domain Authority and Page Authority - Top 500 - 1000 in nation - I want to know which ones are follow and no-follow too - Does anyone know? Has anyone run such a report yet? Thanks for help - BD
Moz Pro | | creativeguy0 -
Is anybody else having problems with Open Site Explorer downloads
I've been trying to get a CSV for linking domains for two days now and still have nothing. It got to the "Finalizing" status within a few hours and stayed that way for about 24 hours, and now it's back to the beginning of a "pending" status.
Moz Pro | | BlastAM0 -
Why is the SEOmoz customer service on this site so awful?
Half the time the tools don't work and there isn't any accountability. Has anyone else had the same experience?
Moz Pro | | wpsoule1 -
Links from External Sites not Showing on OpenSite or Google Webmaster Tools
Hi, I asked this in another post, but didn't get a solid answer. For several websites I manage, I have access to their Google Webmaster Tools. When I put the site through there, or the link:// or SEOMoz's OpenSite link reporter, I get not even a fraction of the links that I know are pointing to the websites in question. Some of these links are from home pages or side columns, and some are from articles keep within a website, like at Inc.com. I wondered if the links in question were not themselves being indexed, but if I do a very specific search, I can pull them up in the search results. Is it just common knowledge that these link tools are not accurate? And to assume that somehow, search engines really do see all of the inbound links, even if our reporting tools don't. Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | lilactree0 -
Seomoz Customer Service does anyone feel let down
I would like to know if anyone else feels let down by seomoz and their customer service. I will give you a couple of examples why i feel let down. I contacted customer services over an issue a couple of weeks a go and never got an answer from them, and the second issue is the private question that you can ask. I asked many days ago and it was an important question and it has still not been answered. I am just wondering what we are paying for by using this site and if other customers of this service feel let down like me.
Moz Pro | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Multi-languae site anda Campaigns
Hi, I need to optimize a multi-language site. It's an hotel chain website and has 4 languages. Each language version of the site must be optimize for a diferente Google Engine. The english version of the web must be optimized for Google United States, an so on. Do I need to create a new Campaign for each language? or can I use more than 4 Engines in one campaign. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | Dragut-Comunicacion0