Howdy y'all. I wanted to give a brief update (not quite worthy of a blog post, but more than would fit in a tweet) about the latest Mozscape index update.
On January 27th, we released our largest web index ever, with 285 Billion unique URLs, and 1.25 Trillion links. Our previous index was also a record at 217 Billion pages, but this one is another 30% bigger. That's all good news - it means more links that you're seeking are likely to be in this index, and link counts, on average, will go up.
There are two oddities about this index, however, that I should share:
The first is that we broke one particular view of data - 301'ing links sorted by Page Authority doesn't work in this index, so we've defaulted to sorting 301s by Domain Authority. That should be fixed in the next index, and from our analytics, doesn't appear to be a hugely popular view, so it shouldn't affect many folks (you can always export to CSV and re-sort by PA in Excel if you need, too - note that if you have more than 10K links, OSE will only export the first 10K, so if you need more data, check out the API).
The second is that we crawled a massively more diverse set of root domains than ever before. Whereas our previous index topped out at 192 million root domains, this latest one has 362 million (almost 1.9X as many unique, new domains we haven't crawled before). This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too). It also means that, for many of the big, more important sites on the web, we are crawling a little less deeply than we have in the past (the index grew by ~31% while the root domains grew by ~88%). Often, those deep pages on large sites do more internal than external linking, so this might not have a big impact, but it could depend on your field/niche and where your links come from.
As always, my best suggestion is to make sure to compare your link data against your competition - that's a great way to see how relative changes are occurring and whether, generally speaking, you're losing or gaining ground in your field.
If you have specific questions, feel free to leave them and I'll do my best to answer in a timely fashion. Thanks much!
p.s. You can always find information about our index updates here.