Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best Backlink checker - OSE or Hrefs?
-
Hi Guys
I am looking for a new back link tool but i'm not sure which one to go for.
Should I continue using Open Site Explorer or should I go for something else like Ahrefs.com or something else?
-
Both are quite different, so it really depends on what you are after. I'm actually a big fan of majestiseo (just to confuse things further). OSE is good for understanding the big picture. However I find that its crawl isn't anywhere deep enough for the stuff I work on - particularly in terms of deep pages on large authority sites. Example: links from the bbc are almost the holy grail for some of the projects that I work on, but OSE often misses them.
Ahrefs is better, and majestic goes deeper still. The down-side of that is that you get a lot more low quality stuff to sort through.
In terms of majestic v ahrefs, ahrefs definitely wins in terms of interface / tools. I'm an excel guy though, so it is all about the data for me - hence majestic being my "weapon of choice".
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
-
Backlinks from translated content
Hello, We have quite a few articles "out there" that give us backlinks. We were thinking of also translating the content and submitting it to local content websites, so it can provide us with more backlinks. The main questions here, will this content be recognized as the same content as the English version? Also, being in another language, some of the anchor text might not hit the English keyword. Not sure how Google sees it. Any advise on the matter? thx!!
Link Building | | PangeaLangs0 -
Best Name for Business and Backlinks / SEO
Sorry if this is a basic question I should know the answer for. We have just acquired the .org for a moderately well searched keyword set. Our objective is to fight for rank specifically on this one set of two keywords. We want make sure our site is setup and business named optimally for this. Here is my question. What is the best business name for SEO and keyword rich backlinks, or anything else I'm not thinking of? KEYWORDS: Blue Widget DOMAIN: BlueWidget.org BUSINESS NAME OPTIONS: A) simply BlueWidget.org. We like this but do we lose some benefit of "Blue Widget" with a space on backlinks? **B) Blue Widget Foundation. Is this better because people will reference us by the keywords with a space "The Blue Widget Foundation", instead of "from the people at BLUEWIDGET.org"? ** Am I missing anything important here in the name? We just want to start everything off on the right foot. Thank you Moz. Just joined and my first post.
Link Building | | RetBit0 -
How to index Backlinks Fast in Google!
I Made few backlinks with my keyword but they are not getting index and it has been for 15 days. Do you have any idea that will help me out to solve this problem and also to index back links quickly.
Link Building | | rohitdeveloper0 -
Do citations count as backlinks?
Hello, So I may have a simple question- do citations such as yp and manta for an example count as backlinks? So if they do, would this be a natural link so good for seo? or a citation where it may be a backlink, but not very helpful for seo backlink profile? Thank you to all
Link Building | | Berner0 -
Best Way to Market a White Paper
Hello everyone, I had to write a white paper for an entirely different purpose than to drive links, but it did come out very well and I think it would be a fantastic tool in my SEO efforts. What do you guys think is the best way to market a white paper? Obviously I will let our email subscribers know about it and place a link to it in a prominent place on the website, but if anyone has any extra ideas, I would love to hear them. Also, what is the best way to host it? Taking the Moz beginners guide for example, I would love to just put it on my server like http://static.seomoz.org/files/SEOmoz-The-Beginners-Guide-To-SEO-2012.pdf but is it necessary that I make it web-friendly like http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo? Can the former do anything for SEO? What if there are links to and from the site? Any advice would be great. Thanks
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Should we BackLink to Guest Post ?
Hi, I have been actively doing guest blogging for last few weeks . But the page authority , moz Rank and moz Trust of my guest posts appear 0 as those posts have their own pages on blogs with snippets of posts on home page. I wanted to ask if i should backlink to my guest posts to increase the authority, mR and mT of pages. Those posts are already appearing as backlinks in webmaster tools but if i backlink to my posts to increase mR and mT, then will it also increase the juice passed by backlinks in those posts to landing pages on my site ? Thanks,
Link Building | | shaz_lhr0 -
Should I Just Copy A Competitor's Backlinks?
Forgive the newbie question, but now that I have found SeoMoz and OpenSiteExplorer, should I just piggy back on my competitors backlinks? What would be the downside? By way of explanation, I've never had the need to explore SEO before. Our site, Widgets.com has always ranked highly for all Widgets keywords because we have the keyword in our domain and our site has been around since 1998. But out of the blue this summer, a site, let's call them WidgetsCircus.com suddenly began outranking us on widgets keywords, and pretty much every keyword we can imagine in our little widget universe. Now that I have run OpenSiteExplorer, I can see how they've done it. They've pretty much spent the last year commenting on blog posts all over the place, editing wiki pages, etc., and built thousands of links for all these widget keywords. So, I'm wondering: why shouldn't I just go down the list of links and do exactly what they've done? Where they commented on a blog, why don't I just comment right along side them. Obviously, this has worked for them! Wouldn't it work for us too? Or is that too simple?
Link Building | | brianmcc0 -
How important are edu and gov backlinks?
I have heard that edu and gov backlinks are important but how so in a niche area like mine - real estate? Perhaps I am missing the point but I do not see how either type of site would ever backlink to a commercial real estate entity. If these are that important in theory, are they obtainable in practice?
Link Building | | casper4340