Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Howdy Moz friends, Today, the Moz team is making a new tool -- Link Explorer -- available in private beta for Moz Pro subscribers (including those taking a free trial). The tool is still a little ways out from public launch, but we wanted to get your feedback to help make it the best product it can be. What's Link Explorer? In essence, it's a replacement for Open Site Explorer (Moz's tool for link discovery, competitive analysis, and link building) that addresses many of its most pernicious challenges, such as: Daily updates - no longer will you need to wait a month or two to see a new DA score or the links you built last week. Link Explorer updates every 24 hours with all the new links we've discovered that day, and gives a new DA score each night. A MUCH bigger index - OSE has always been known for having quality links, but quantity has been an issue. No longer. The new tool's link index is more than 20 times larger than Open Site Explorer's, covering trillions of links across hundreds of billions of pages, while maintaining a focus on high quality domains and pages. Additional functionality - new graphs (like link growth over time), new charts (like gained+lost links), new filters and sorts, and some new kinds of data coming soon. Improved metrics - Domain Authority and Page Authority have both been upgraded to have better correlations with Google's rankings (and they now update every 24 hours) Insanely fast - page load times on the new tool are almost as fast as Google's results 🙂 Less time waiting means more time to dig into results Link Tracking Lists - check a box next to any links of interest and you can build lists in the tool  to track them over time, see whether/when they link, prioritize your outreach efforts, and (in the future) get aggregated data and alerts about those links There's much more to come, but we'd love for you to check out Link Explorer, find bugs, report things you love (and don't), and help us make it the best possible product for you and your teams. You can leave feedback here in this Q+A thread, email help@moz.com, or send feedback through the feedback form in Link Explorer.

Howdy gang, This is my last discussion post in the series on keyword metrics in KW Explorer & Moz Pro (previously on Keyword Difficulty, Opportunity, & Volume). In this one, let's chat about the "Priority Score," a feature you'll find in Keyword Explorer on any lists you build. Priority was conceived to help aggregate all the other metrics - Difficulty, Opportunity, Volume, and (if you choose to use it) Importance. We wanted to create an easy way to sort keywords so the cream would rise to the top -- cream in this case being keywords with low difficulty, high opportunity, strong volume, and high importance (again, if you choose to use it). Thus, when it comes to Priority Score, there's no particular number you should necessarily seek out, but higher is better. When you get into the ranges of 80+ (which is quite rare, Single Malt Scotch is one of the few examples I could find, and only because it's volume is so high and there's only a couple SERP features), you're generally talking about keywords with high demand (lots of monthly searches), the difficulty isn't too crazy (a website in the 55-80 DA range might have a shot), and the CTR Opportunity is decently strong (usually not too many SERP features that take clicks and attention away from the organic web results). Below that score range, you're usually finding keywords where one or more of those isn't true -- there's either lower volume, heavier competition, or lots of SERP features with the accompanying lower estimated CTR. When you're building KW lists, my view is that there's no "good" or "bad" Priority scores, only relative scores. Priority should be used to help you determine which terms and phrases to target first -- it's like a cheat code to unlock the low hanging fruit. If you build large lists of 50-100 or more keywords, Priority is a powerful and easy way to sort. It becomes even more useful if you use the Importance score to help add an estimation of value to you/your business/your client in to the mix. In that case, Importance can cut Priority by up to 2/3rds (if you set it at 1) or raise it by a little more than 3X (if you set it at 10). This is hyper-useful to nudge keywords with middling scores up if they're super-important to your marketing efforts. Look forward to your feedback, and thanks for checking these out!

Hi All! Continuing my series of discussions about the various keyword scores we use here at Moz (previously: Keyword Difficulty & Keyword Opportunity)... Let's move on to Volume. Volume in Moz's tools is expressed in a range, e.g. Bartending Certification has volume of 201-500. These ranges correspond to data we have suggesting that in an average month, that keyword is searched for a minimum of X to a maximum of Y (where X-Y is the volume range). We use clickstream data as well as data from Google AdWords and then some PPC AdWords campaigns we run and have access to when we build the models for our volume data. As such, we've got very high confidence in these numbers -- 95%+ of the time, a given keyword's monthly search volume on Google will fall inside that range. If you want to see all the nitty gritty details, check out Russ Jones post on Moz's Keyword Volume and how we calculate it. As far as a "good" volume score -- higher is usually better, as it means more demand, but lots of keywords with low volume scores can also add up to strong traffic when combined, and they may be more relevant. Capturing exactly the audience you want that also wants you is what SEO is all about. p.s. When Keyword Explorer or Moz Pro gives you a "no data" or "unknown" volume number, it may just mean we haven't collected information from our clickstream providers or AdWords crawls, not that the keyword has no volume (though it sometimes means that, too, we just don't know yet). One way to verify - see if Google Suggest autofills it in when you type in the search box. If it does, that's usually a sign there's at least some volume (even if it's only a few searches a month).

Hi Folks! You might have seen my discussion on What Is a Good Keyword Difficulty Score, and this is a continuation of the same vein. Keyword Organic CTR is probably my favorite score we developed in Keyword Explorer and Moz Pro. It looks at the SERP features that appear in a set of results (e.g. an image block, AdWords ads, a featured snippet, or knowledge graph) and then calculates, using CTRs we built off our partnership with Jumpshot's clickstream data, what percent of searchers are likely to click on the organic, web results. For example, in a search query like Nuoc Cham Ingredients, you've got a featured snippet and then a "People Also Ask" feature above the web results, and thus, Keyword Explorer is giving me an Organic CTR Score of 64. This translates directly to an estimated 64% click-through rate to the web results. Compare that to a search query like Fabric Printed Off Grain, where there's a single SERP feature - just the "People Also Ask" box, and it's between the 6th and 7th result. In this case, Keyword Explorer shows an Organic CTR Score of 94, because we estimate that those PAAs are only taking 6% of the available clicks. There are two smart ways you should be using Organic CTR Score: As a way to modify the estimated volume and estimated value of ranking in the web results for a given keyword term/phrase (KW Explorer does this for you if you use the "Lists" and sort based on Potential, which factors in all the other scores, including volume, difficulty, and organic CTR) As a way to identify SEO opportunities outside the normal, organic web results in other SERP features (e.g. in the Nuoc Cham Ingredients SERPs, there's serious opportunity to take over that featured snippet and get some great traffic) OK, so all that said, what's actually a "good" Organic CTR score? Well... If you're doing classic, 10-blue-links style SEO only, 100 is what you want. But, if you're optimizing for SERP features, and you appear in a featured snippet or the image block or top stories or any of those others, you'd probably be very happy to find that CTR was going to those non-web-results sections, and scores in the 40s or 50s would be great (so long as you appear in the right features).

Hey gang, Russ Jones from Moz has been doing a ton of heavy lifting work to try to get around the new problem posed by Google AdWords recent change to merged-keyword volume data. But, we're fighting back against this obfuscation in Keyword Explorer. I'm sharing two emails (slightly edited) from Russ about what we're doing here: Introduction to the Problem: Google Adwords Keyword Planner is the primary source for keyword search volume (how often a keyword is searched monthly on Google) for much of the search marketing industry. While Google has grouped together highly-similar terms for a while (especially misspellings), in June of 2016 they dramatically increased this keyword-grouping. This means similar phrases like "keyword rank", "keyword ranking" and "keyword rankings" would all be reported as having the same, combined search volume, rather than their individual search volumes. If you were to take Google's numbers at face value, you might think there are 3,000 searches per month for these 3 terms, when in reality there is only 1,000, divided amongst the 3 terms. How we are addressing it: Moz's Keyword Explorer uses a blend of data sources, not just Keyword Planner, to build our volume metrics. This gives us a distinct advantage in that we can adjust the volume of words that deviate dramatically in one data set verses another. Take for example the phrases "keyword rank", "keyword ranking", and "keyword rankings". While Google Keyword Planner might report all of these as having 1,000 searches per month, Moz Keyword Explorer can detect that these numbers are significantly higher than what our models would predict given our other data sets. We can then adjust the volume accordingly. Moreover, given our huge keyword data set, we can also identify grouped phrases (like these 3) and divide the volume proportionally to what we see in our other data sets. Thus, we address the grouping problem from multiple directions. Here's email #2 from Russ, detailing more of how we're attacking this: I have been working pretty much non-stop on this keyword volume disambiguation problem (finding the real search volume of individual keywords when Google clumps several together). I think I have settled on a pretty good solution and am working on getting it all in. For example... Google Keyword Volume for the phrases "briefcase for women" and "briefcases for women" are both at 3600 because they have been lumped together. My disambiguation script says the singular (briefcase for women) should be 2731 and the plural should be 869. Google Trends roughly agrees with this, showing that the singular is searched more than 2x the plural: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=briefcase%20for%20women%2C%20briefcases%20for%20women&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 Basically, Keyword Explorer should already be providing some more accurate/segmented numbers than AdWords, and in the future, we'll get even better thanks to our clickstream data and our evolving models. Any questions, let us know!

Howdy gang - as you probably saw, we launched our biggest new tool in Pro in many years today: https://moz.com/explorer If you're a Moz Pro subscriber, you've already got access. We went ahead and gave folks who were at $99/month before today 300 queries/month. If you're signing up new, $99/month doesn't have KW Explorer access, but the other levels - at $149/month and above, do (5,000+ queries/month). You can read the blog post here for lots of details, but if you have questions or product suggestions, please don't hesitate to ask!

UPDATE 12/01/15: This issue is now resolved and Just Discovered Link data is back. Sadly, I've got bad news. Due to an error we made (literally a typo on a curl command), Just Discovered Links in Open Site Explorer will be unavailable for 2-3 days. The data was actually lost, but we're re-indexing all those links now and they should be back in working order by Monday. NOTE: this only affects link counts and links listed in the "Just Discovered" sections of OSE. No links in the main index nor any metrics (PA/DA/etc) are affected. Our sincere apologies - we're going to build mechanisms to prevent this for the future.

Howdy folks, Every time we do an index update here at Moz, we get a tremendous number of questions about Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores fluctuating. Typically, each index (which release approximately monthly), many billions of sites will see their scores go up, while others will go down. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential influencing factors: You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
Remember that, because Mozscape indices take 3-4 weeks to process, the data collected in an index is between ~21-90 days old. Even on the day of release, the newest link data you'll see was crawled ~21 days ago, and can go as far back as 90 days (the oldest crawlsets we include in processing). If you've done very recent link growth (or shrinkage) that won't be seen by our index until we've crawled and processed the next index. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more
Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it's harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren't growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops. This is because of the scaling process - if Facebook.com (currently with a DA of 100) grows its link profile massively, that becomes the new DA 100, and it will be harder for other sites that aren't growing quality links as fast to get from 99 to 100 or even from 89 to 90. This is true across the scale of DA/PA, and makes it critical to measure a site's DA and a page's PA against the competition, not just trended against itself. You could earn loads of great links, and still see a DA drop due to these scaling types of features. Always compare against similar sites and pages to get the best sense of relative performance, since DA/PA are relative, not absolute scores. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings
PA/DA are created using a machine-learning algorithm whose training set is search results in Google. Over time, as Google gets pickier about which types of links it counts, and as Mozscape picks up on those changes, PA/DA scores will change to reflect it. Thus, lots of low quality links or links from domains that don't seem to influence Google's rankings are likely to not have a positive effect on PA/DA. On the flip side, you could do no link growth whatsoever and see rising PA/DA scores if the links from the sites/pages you already have appear to be growing in importance in influencing Google's rankings. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't)
Moz is constantly working to improve the shape of our index - choosing which pages to crawl and which to ignore. Our goal is to build the most "Google-shaped" index we can, representative of what Google keeps in their main index and counts as valuable/important links that influence rankings. We make tweaks aimed at this goal each index cycle, but not always perfectly (you can see that in 2015, we crawled a ton more domains, but found that many of those were, in fact, low quality and not valuable, thus we stopped). Moz's crawlers can crawl the web extremely fast and efficiently, but our processing time prevents us from building as large an index as we'd like and as large as our competitors (you will see more links represented in both Ahrefs and Majestic, two competitors to Mozscape that I recommend). Moz calculates valuable metrics that these others do not (like PA/DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, etc), but these metrics require hundreds of hours of processing and that time scales linearly with the size of the index, which means we have to stay smaller in order to calculate them. Long term, we are building a new indexing system that can process in real time and scale much larger, but this is a massive undertaking and is still a long time away. In the meantime, as our crawl shape changes to imitate Google, we may miss links that point to a site or page, and/or overindex a section of the web that points to sites/pages, causing fluctuations in link metrics. If you'd like to insure that a URL will be crawled, you can visit that page with the Mozbar or search for it in OSE, and during the next index cycle (or, possibly 2 index cycles depending on where we are in the process), we'll crawl that page and include it. We've found this does not bias our index since these requests represent tiny fractions of a percent of the overall index (<0.1% in total). My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings. You can also pay attention to our coverage of Google metrics, which we report with each index, and to our correlations with rankings metrics. If these fall, it means Mozscape has gotten less Google-shaped and less representative of what influences rankings. If they rise, it means Mozscape has gotten better. Obviously, our goal is to consistently improve, but we can't be sure that every variation we attempt will have universally positive impacts until we measure them. Thanks for reading through, and if you have any questions, please leave them for us below. I'll do my best to follow up quickly.

Howdy gang, As you might have seen, we've finally been able to update the Mozscape index after many challenging technical problems in the last 40 days. However, this index has some unique qualities (most of them not ideal) that I should describe. First, this index still contains data crawled up to 100 days ago. We try to make sure that what we've crawled recently is stuff that we believe has been updated/changed, but there may be sites and pages that have changed significantly in that period that we didn't update (due to issues I've described here previously with our crawlers & schedulers). Second, many PA/DA and other metric scores will look very similar to the last index because we lost and had problems with some metrics in processing (and believe that much of what we calculated may have been erroneous). We're using metrics from the prior index (which had good correlations with Google, etc) until we can feel confident that the new ones we're calculating are correct. That should be finished by the next index, which, also, should be out much faster than this one (more on that below). Long story short on this one - if your link counts went up and you're seeing much better/new links pointing to you, but DA/PA remain unchanged, don't panic - that's due to problems on our end with calculations and will be remedied in the next index. Third - the good news is that we've found and fixed a vast array of issues (many of them hiding behind false problems we thought we had), and we now believe we'll be able to ship the next index with greater quality, greater speed, and better coverage. One thing we're now doing is taking every URL we've ever seen in Google's SERPs (via all our rank tracking, SERPscape, the corpus for the upcoming KW Explorer product, etc) and prioritizing them in Mozscape's crawl, so we expect to be matching what Google sees a bit more closely in future indices. My apologies for the delay in getting this post up - I was on a plane to London for Searchlove - should have got it up before I left.

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.

Update 5:27pm 8/4 - the data in Open Site Explorer is up-to-date, as is the API and Mozbar. Moz Analytics campaigns are currently loading in the new data, and all campaigns should be fully up-to-date by 4-10pm tomorrow (8/5). However, your campaign may have the new data much earlier as it depends on where that campaign falls in the update ordering. Hey gang, I wanted to provide some transparency into the latest index update, as well as give some information about our plans going forward with future indices. The Good News: This index, now that it's delivered, is pretty impressive. Mozscape's August index is 407 Billion URLs in size, nearly 100 Billion (~25%) bigger than our last record index size. We indexed 2.18 trillion links for the first time ever (prior record was 1.54 trillion). Correlations for Page Authority have gone up from 0.319 to 0.333 in the latest index, suggesting that we're getting a slightly more accurate representation of Google's use of links in rankings from this data (DA correlations remain constant at 0.185) Our hit ratio for URLs in Google's SERPs has gone up considerably, from 69.97% in our previous index to 78.66% in the August update. This indicates we are crawling and indexing more of what Google shows in the search results (a good benchmark for us). Note that a large portion of what's missing will be things published in the last 30-60 days while we were processing the index (after crawling had stopped). The Bad News: August's index was late by ~25 days. We know that reliable, consistent, on-time Mozscape updates are critically important to everyone who uses Moz's products. We've been working hard for years to get these to a better place, but have struggled mightily. Our latest string of failures was completely new to the team - a bunch of problems and issues we've never seen before (some due to the index size, but many due to odd things like a massive group of what appear to be spam domains using the Palau TLD extension clogging up crawl/processing, large chunks of pages we crawled with 10s of thousands of links which slow down the MozRank calculations, etc). While there's no excuse for delays, and we don't want to pass these off as such, we do want to be transparent about why we were so late. Our future plans include scaling back the index sizes a bit, dealing with the issues around spam domains, large link-list pages, some of the odd patterns we see in .pl and .cn domains, and taking one extra person from the Big Data team off of work on the new index system (which will be much larger and real-time rather than updated every 30 days) to help with Mozscape indices. We believe these efforts, and the new monitoring systems we've got will help us get better at producing high quality, consistent indices. Question everyone always asks: Why did my PA/DA change?! There are tons of reasons why these can change, and they don't necessarily mean anything bad about your site, your SEO efforts, or whether your links are helping you rank. PA and DA are predictive, correlated metrics that say nothing about how you're actually performing. They merely map better than most metrics to Google's global rankings across large SERP sets (but not necessarily your SERPs, which is what you should care about). That said, here's some of the reasons PA/DA do shift: The domains/pages with the highest PA/DA scores gain even faster than most of the domains below them, making it harder each index to get higher scores (since PA/DA are on a logarithmic scale, this is smoothed out somewhat - it would be much worse on a conventional scale, e.g. Facebook.com 100, everyone else 0.0003). Google's ranking algorithm introduces new elements, changes, modifies what they care about, etc. Moz crawls a set of the web that does or doesn't include the pages that are more likely to point to a given domain than another. Although our crawl tends to be representative, if you've got lots of links from deep pages on less popular domains in a part of the web far from the mainstream, we may not consistently crawl those well (or, we could overcrawl your sector because it recently received powerful links from the center of the web). My advice, as always, is to use PA/DA as relative scores. If your scores are falling, but your competitors' are falling more, that's not a bad thing. If your scores are rising, but your competitors' are rising faster, they're probably gaining ground on you. And, if you're talking about score changes in the 1-4 points range, that's not necessarily anything but noise. PA/DA scores often shift 1-4 points up or down in a new index so don't sweat it! Let me know if you've got more questions and I'll do my best to answer. You can also refer to the API update page here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates

Hey gang, As you may be aware, we were considerably late with our last index release. You have my sincere apologies for that and the apologies of the entire team. In the interest of transparency, I want to try to explain what's been going on. Since stepping down as CEO, I've been asked to take on a few roles in the company. One of those is product architect (basically the product owner) of our Big Data team, who produces the Mozscape link index. For several years, that team has been almost exclusively focused on getting us closer to a near real-time indexing system that does not have scalability issues. Mozscape is currently smaller than our major competitors, and we're also often slower. Our metrics (PA, DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, Social Data, etc) have been the unique value we provide, but it's not enough. We need to be competitive on size and freshness. Building a raw link index (without processed metrics like PA/DA et al) is hard, but it's possible. Building a link index with those metrics is really tricky, and requires computer science knowledge and skills far beyond the scope of my understanding. That's what our team's been working on, and they've made some progress, but it's been slow, hampered by unknown unknowns, and materially hurt by a lack of experienced talent we can hire to help (we've had open job posts for years now). In the meantime, our historic Mozscape index structure keeps encountering challenges - this latest round is still somewhat unexplained (we believe there's hardware issues compounded by how the system is architected to handle large domains, but there may be other issues). The team's struggled to split time between keeping the old Mozscape running and hunkering down to finish the new system. I'm trying to help them balance things as best I can, and we're going to be putting effort toward making sure we get index releases out on time. However, to do that, we'll need to scale down size, and then rebuild back up. We think we can do this while also improving the prioritization of which links we crawl (e.g. deeper on important domains that link out, less so on deep pages that don't link anywhere) so the index overall improves. However, I don't want to minimize the risks - we may have some slow updates, some smaller indices, and some less-than-ideal data in the next one or two indices while we work to remedy this issue. I HOPE we don't, and that things actually get better immediately, but we can't promise that until the work gets finished. TL;DR - Mozscape V2 is in development and will let us as big and faster as any link index. In the meantime, current Mozscape's having issues & we're making smaller indices in an attempt to diagnose and repair. As always, thanks for your understanding, continued support, and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them below. I realize that this level of service/product quality is NOT OK, and I'm doing everything in my power to fix it.

Hey gang - I wanted to mention a small update we've made to Fresh Web Explorer (I was the architect on this one). It enables you to filter your searches and/or your Alerts to show only those sources/domains we've observed in Google News. E.g. here's a search for GigaOm with news filtering on (180 results in the last 7 days) vs. the same search with news filtering off (1,811 results). It's mostly useful for folks who are getting overwhelmed by the quantity of mentions they see in FWE and Alerts (I was experiencing that myself with mentions for my name and Moz) and just want to filter to the most important/noteworthy stuff. It's not perfect - Google News does have some weird domains that show in there occasionally - but it's definitely a much better filter if you have a bigger brand or term/phrase you're watching. Any questions or feedback, please let us know!

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.

I wanted to start a thread to share some of the really cool marketing tactics I've seen on the web that I think few folks are using, AND ask the community here what you've seen, too! Some of my favorite undiscovered or less-used tactics include: Making smart use of bios for conferences, events, interviews, etc. where folks ask you or your team members for a "bio" and you get to control the links, link targets, and anchor text. This is super powerful in my experience, so long as you have a moderately strong profile or regular participation in this type of stuff. Price anchoring on conversion pages, e.g. http://www.trackur.com/options - note how they start with the highest price to help "anchor" the audience to bigger numbers. A great principle of psychology in action. Using re-marketing to draw people to content rather than just purchase/conversion pages. The effectiveness of these is, I've heard, dramatically higher than the usual re-marketing campaigns that take you to a squeeze or purchase page. I can't share the example I'm thinking of, unfortunately, but I'd urge you to try it! Get more social shares and clicks by SHARING MORE THAN ONCE! A lot of folks feel like they are burdening their audience on Twitter/Facebook/G+ or frustrating them if they post multiple times, when in fact, very, very few of your followers are online at any given time. I've tested this myself and I get almost no negative feedback but can triple or more the number of shares/+1s/likes/visits/etc I get just by sharing 2-3X! The key is not to be too repetitive or annoying, and to acknowledge past shares (at least for me). e.g. I'll say "my blog post from last night on XYZ" and get a ton more clicks. What are your favorites? Please share!

See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week. farmer-3x.gif

Have you had success with any particular methodologies that you'd recommend?