Spring is here and so is our May Index Update!
-
Happy Index Release Day!
For the second month in a row, our hard-working, supremely dedicated Big Data team has delivered our Index Update EARLY! Beyond being punctual, the May Index is one of our most comprehensive and largest update of the year for Moz.
Let’s dig into the details:
-
162,225,495,455 (162 billion) URLs.
-
1,135,327,420 (1.1 billion) subdomains.
-
194,346,505 (194 million) root domains.
-
1,168,465,575,815 (1.1 Trillion) links.
-
Followed vs nofollowed links
-
2.84% of all links found were nofollowed
-
65.80% of nofollowed links are internal
-
34.20% are external
-
Rel canonical: 28.89% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag
-
The average page has 92 links on it
-
76 internal links on average.
-
16 external links on average..
Go have fun with your new 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
-
-
Thank you for this update. I have Tumblr, Blogspot etc. that I use as part of my strategy and it is quite disconcerting this morning to see an individual post on a Tumblr blog with a PA of 94. It's like looking in your bank and seeing a balance of 100K.
-
Thanks Ian. I wanted to add on that we've got a little bit of strange issue with some domains in this index that may affect some sorting and link lists.
Basic story: We blacklist domains that have more than 10,000 subdomains and have other features that we've observed make them, almost always, webspam. Since they can adversely impact metrics and scores, we just don't include them in the index. The last 6 months, this process has gone really well, but this index, we hit a bug, and accidentally excluded ~750 domains that aren't all spam, including big ones like Etsy.com, Wikia.com, Blogspot.com, Quora.com, and others.
Initially, folks noticed because the PA/DA scores for these sites were all 1. That part has been fixed, and the metrics should now be more accurate. But, we don't have the link lists for these sites, and we don't have PA scores for the interior pages on these domains. As such, if you're sorting your link lists or if you're researching links that point to a page on Etsy.com or Blogspot.com or Wikia.com or a few others, you'll see no data. This will be fixed in our next index, but we couldn't fix it in this one. The bug was caught, but caught too late, and thus the next 28(ish) days will have some of these sorting and link list issues on these ~750 domains (of which, I estimate, only ~150 or so are actually legit sites - most of the others are, indeed, spam).
If you've got any additional questions I can answer about this, please let me know. Apologies for the error from me and from the team - we'll make sure to get this right in the future, and we've set up new kinds of tests to prevent any similar issues from going unnoticed.
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
-
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.
API | | Slumberjac0 -
Is everybody seeing DA/PA-drops after last MOZ-api update?
Hi all, I was wondering what happend at the last MOZ-update. The MOZ-health page has no current errors and i've checked a lot of websites probably about 50 a 60 from our customers and from our competitiors and everybody seems to have a decrease in DA's / PA's. Not just a couple went up and down like normally would happen, but all seems to have dropped.... Is anyone seeing the same in their campaigns? Greetings,
API | | NielsVos
Niels3 -
Mozscape Index update frequency problems?
I'm new to Moz, only a member for a couple months now. But I already rely heavily on the mozscape index data for link building, as I'm sure many people do. I've been waiting for the latest update (due today after delay), but am not seeing any mention of the data yet - does it normally get added later in the day? I'm not that impatient that I can't wait until later today or tomorrow for this index update, but what I am curious about is whether Moz is struggling to keep up, and if updates will continue to get more and more rare? For example, in 2013 I count 28 index updates. In 2014 that number dropped to 14 updates (50% drop). In 2015, there was only 8 (another 43% drop), and so far this year (until the March 2nd update is posted) there has only been 1. This isn't just a complaint about updates, I'm hoping to get input from some of the more experienced Moz customers to better understand (with the exception of the catastrophic drive failure) the challenges that Moz is facing and what the future may hold for update frequency.
API | | kevin.kembel1 -
First Mozscape index of the year is live
I'm happy to announce, the first index of the year is out. We did have a smaller count of subdomains, but correlations are generally up and coverage of what's in Google looks better, too. We're giving that one a high five! We've (hopefully) removed a lot of foreign and spam subdomains, which you might see reflected in your spam links section. (another woot!) Here are some details about this index release: 145,549,223,632 (145 billion) URLs 1,356,731,650 (1 billion) subdomains 200,255,095 (200 million) root domains 1,165,625,349,576 (1.1 Trillion) links Followed vs nofollowed links 3.17% of all links found were nofollowed 63.49% of nofollowed links are internal 36.51% are external Rel canonical: 26.50% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag The average page has 89 links on it 72 internal links on average 17 external links on average Thanks! 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 | | jennita5 -
January’s Mozscape Index Release Date has Been Pushed Back to Jan. 29th
With a new year brings new challenges. Unfortunately for all of us, one of those challenges manifested itself as a hardware issue within one of the Mozscape disc drives. Our team’s attempts to recover the data from the faulty drive only lead to finding corrupted files within the Index. Due to this issue we had to push the January Mozscape Index release date back to the 29<sup>th</sup>. This is not at all how we anticipated starting 2016, however hardware failures like this are an occasional reality and are also not something we see being a repeated hurdle moving forward. Our Big Data team has the new index processing and everything is looking great for the January 29<sup>th</sup> update. We never enjoy delivering bad news to our faithful community and are doing everything in our power to lessen these occurrences. Reach out with any questions or concerns.
API | | IanWatson2 -
September's Mozscape Update Broke; We're Building a New Index
Hey gang, I hate to write to you all again with more bad news, but such is life. Our big data team produced an index this week but, upon analysis, found that our crawlers had encountered a massive number of non-200 URLs, which meant this index was not only smaller, but also weirdly biased. PA and DA scores were way off, coverage of the right URLs went haywire, and our metrics that we use to gauge quality told us this index simply was not good enough to launch. Thus, we're in the process of rebuilding an index as fast as possible, but this takes, at minimum 19-20 days, and may take as long as 30 days. This sucks. There's no excuse. We need to do better and we owe all of you and all of the folks who use Mozscape better, more reliable updates. I'm embarassed and so is the team. We all want to deliver the best product, but continue to find problems we didn't account for, and have to go back and build systems in our software to look for them. In the spirit of transparency (not as an excuse), the problem appears to be a large number of new subdomains that found their way into our crawlers and exposed us to issues fetching robots.txt files that timed out and stalled our crawlers. In addition, some new portions of the link graph we crawled exposed us to websites/pages that we need to find ways to exclude, as these abuse our metrics for prioritizing crawls (aka PageRank, much like Google, but they're obviously much more sophisticated and experienced with this) and bias us to junky stuff which keeps us from getting to the good stuff we need. We have dozens of ideas to fix this, and we've managed to fix problems like this in the past (prior issues like .cn domains overwhelming our index, link wheels and webspam holes, etc plagued us and have been addressed, but every couple indices it seems we face a new challenge like this). Our biggest issue is one of monitoring and processing times. We don't see what's in a web index until it's finished processing, which means we don't know if we're building a good index until it's done. It's a lot of work to re-build the processing system so there can be visibility at checkpoints, but that appears to be necessary right now. Unfortunately, it takes time away from building the new, realtime version of our index (which is what we really want to finish and launch!). Such is the frustration of trying to tweak an old system while simultaneously working on a new, better one. Tradeoffs have to be made. For now, we're prioritizing fixing the old Mozscape system, getting a new index out as soon as possible, and then working to improve visibility and our crawl rules. I'm happy to answer any and all questions, and you have my deep, regretful apologies for once again letting you down. We will continue to do everything in our power to improve and fix these ongoing problems.
API | | randfish11 -
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
