The New Link Explorer (which will replace Open Site Explorer) is Now in Beta

[randfish]

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 [email protected], or send feedback through the feedback form in Link Explorer.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Hi Rand,

I found myself last night explaining to my fiancee (and owner of my business) about why we'd lost some of our precious Moz DA points.  She was disappointed looking at the new metric and I assured her the below and wonder whether you could sort of give a semi official 'what to tell stakeholders' in the event of a loss of DA. This is probably a much bigger issue for agencies than in-house people.

Let me assure you _I understand _that DA is a comparative metric and prefer a more accurate picture and prefer to know the real picture. Plus there's all the benefits you outline in the OP.  But I found myself saying:

1. Dont worry - it isn't actually linked to google in any way.  A lowered DA assessment by Moz isn't going to affect our traffic, conversions or ROI.  That's a big one.

2. We now have better data and it's not just affected us but our competitors will now have new DA scores and some are better and some are not.

3)  Nothing substantive has changed in the real world.  This is a measuring tool.  So imagine you were proud of your 40 ft yacht but then the length of 1 ft was changed to 11 inches.  Your boat would now be 'shorter' but nothing has actually changed.  Just how we measure it? Wasn't sure about that analogy. Have you a better one?

Thanks.

[Andrew-SEO]

Fair enough. I just wanted to play with my new toys! Thanks for the response.

[randfish]

I don't think there's much value there. We haven't seen the c-block metrics correlate any better than linking domains of late (not surprising given that c-blocks aren't as popular a way to hide link networks anymore), so removed them from the new product.

[randfish]

Thanks Jack! I've been pushing the team to get a pie chart of anchor text (there's a lot of folks at Moz who think pie charts are evil and bad UI, but I like them), so I appreciate the +1 for that feature

[JackSaville]

Hi Rand, Link explorer is a great improvement! I can already see the index is larger, and the "Linking Domains by DA" is really helpful (I previously had to make this graph myself when comparing domains).

One additional thing which I would find helpful would be if it would be possible to display anchor text in a pie chart (like majestic).

Thanks a lot,

Jack

[Andrew-SEO]

Hello again. I hope your week is starting out ok.

Is there anyway to correlate the lost links report with the c-blocks report. Is there any extra useful information to be gained by combining these sections?

[randfish]

Thanks Clive! Thrilled to hear it's been helpful for you. I'm excited to see it get even better

[I.AM.Strategist]

Loving the new Link Explorer - it's obviously a big jump in index size and I have immediately noticed a lot more links which previously didn't show up.

Given that 'link building' is probably the hardest things for most SEOs, having a much wider list of competitor links to evaluate just made everyone's jobs that much easier - so for that reason alone, it's a brilliant new update.

[IanWatson]

Hey Adam,

Could you provide me some examples of url shorteners or proxy sites you are seeing in your results, that are not be caught by our filter? Would love to get these added to our list so we can reduce the noise to just one link per.

We will definitely look to add an option to limit results to one link per domain, but that may take some time. Also, before launch we will be adding a filter on the Linking Domains report to show only domains with follow links.

Thanks for the feedback!

[randfish]

Thanks Andrew! We're very glad to have that in the product, too. Been far too long

[AdamThompsonSSL]

Oh, I agree, it does correlate with higher rankings. But I'd really rather clients not try to track their DA month to month to measure results achieved.

[Andrew-SEO]

Moz did create DA as a substitute for page rank when google stopped releasing the data.

In my experience it does correlate with high rankings and subsequently increased traffic.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

sigh I know, how about Return on Equity.  Like an investment variable relating to activity divided by net profit margin.  I have a 'marketing margin' ratio/KPI that I made up myself.  It's like an equation you'd see in a physics lab.  But it's like feeding pigs truffles. You got to give the people what they want.

[AdamThompsonSSL]

Re #1 it seems that filter does reduce the number that show up, but doesn't remove them completely.

Re #2, the linking domains tool doesn't have the option to only show follow links (that I saw?) so I think that makes it less helpful.

[AdamThompsonSSL]

It amazes me how many people/clients want to track DA as a KPI for their SEO efforts.

[Andrew-SEO]

Howdy Rand

This all looks great. There's two things in particular that jumped out. The more regular DA update sounds ace. As long as it's moving in the right direction of course. Hehe. But that's for me to sort out.

The second is the lost links report. That's the one thing that I always wanted from the that section. That will be so so useful.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Some of your competitors in the competitive intelligence space (not naming names) are recording 3,900 keywords on the desktop then for the mobile it's a whopping 33 keywords.  So it just seems broken and pointless to have on there.  Perhaps the roll-out was a bit Rushed.   But that's different, they are picking up keywords for intel rather than us inputing the keywords we need to track. But it's dumb to have stuff that doesn't work live on your site.  The only thing upsetting people in this beta is losing a couple of precious DA points or having to explain it to their clients.  That's a win for you.  Look how important your metric has become.  Half the people I speak to think DA is actually a Google metric. I look forward to the post.  Thanks again.

[randfish]

Funny you should ask Russ Jones from the Moz team has been working on testing a mobile-first type of index for link data to see what that does to the link graph. He should have a post out before not too long on that topic.

As for what mobile en-GB means as a setting in Moz Analytics, it's basically where/how we rank track - the geography and language that's used to check rankings (in your case "En - English" and "GB - Great Britain").

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Can I please ask (while you're here Rand) what's the position with Mobile results in Moz generally?  Even before Mobile first Indexing I set my Moz data to the Google Mobile en-GB because 80% of my users were using their phones to access my site even two years ago.  What precisely does that Mobile en-GB mean? And has the mobile first index had anything to do with the links beta or is it just a totally separate subject?  Sorry if this is a dumb question.

[randfish]

Thanks Ajaz - outside of this beta product, all the other spots in Moz Pro will still use the DA scores (and link counts) from OSE (including Mozbar). Once we launch publicly, that'll change to the new one though.

[randfish]

Thanks Adam!

Re: 1) There is a toggle in the panel above the link lists to filter out common syndication and shortening URLs. Maybe try checking that? If it's not catching everything, let us know what (here or via a ticket to [email protected]) and we can try adding those to the filtration.

Re: 2) Yeah - we have the "linking domains" view in the tool but adding a "one link per domain" or "up to X link per domain" in the links view is certainly something we can consider, too.

[AjazMozPro]

I've only just skimmed through to have a quick look but already I can see a MAJOR improvement over the OSE. Finally it is recording a true reflection of our links. One question though, the DA is showing +20points which is great but it's not reflected in the Moz dashboard for that campaign, am I missing something?

[AdamThompsonSSL]

Hi Rand,

Super excited to see this. The big jump in data and freshness will make Moz competitive in the link research space again! As a Moz fan (this account is new, but I've been a user since forever), that makes me happy!

My main gripe so far is the reports are noisy. A couple items I noticed:

1. I'm seeing a lot of noise like URL shorteners, The Globe network of link sites, etc. It'd be great to have a filter (on by default) to filter this stuff out when sifting through backlinks. I know there's a filter to only show one, but I'm not sure why they would show up at all - they are not links, they are redirects. So I'd rather see the page that's linking to the bitly link.
2. Also need a filter to only show a couple links per domain. Again, too much noise when a sitewide links shows up dozens of times.

Thanks!

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

If you can do that then I'll be able to save about $500 straight up a month in my subscriptions budget and spend MUCH less time between tools.  SEO heaven. That about sums it up.  And more time to focus on making my people happy and helping my patients smile. 

[randfish]

Thanks Ed! Britney (Muller), Russ (Jones), and I have been pushing the team really hard to get keyword rankings data alongside link data so you can see how the two correlate and connect up. I totally agree that's where the magic comes from in SEO -- accurate rankings + comprehensive link graph = SEO heaven. Hopefully Moz will get there soon!

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Yeah I agree there.  It's going to rival those other tools.  Ahrefs is kind of king of link metrics but I can become lost in the data and sometimes lose sight of all the other stuff I should be doing apart from link-building.  It's almost addictive and I find myself obsessing over the metrics that sometimes don't have an impact on my rankings.

The most impressive thing about Moz is the position tracking which is 100% accurate for me on a local and national level.  I'd love to see historical positions displayed in a chart.  Not sure whether I can do that in Moz already.  But it's really useful to look back at changes you've made and try to correlate them with position changes rather than just see this week's snapshot.  There's a tool called SEO profiler that does this but the problem is the positions are always wildly inaccurate! - so it's a great feature that's sometimes useless if it's not accurate. I'm thinking of jacking in my subscription to them if they can't even get the positions right. Also SEM Rush is showing all my rankings wrongly at the moment.  It's nothing like forecasting my traffic accurately so I figure It's also not forecasting my competitors positions accurately either.  I'm frequently going back to google and doing the work manually to see what the real positions are.  Moz does this very well. Always 100% bang on.

And then this Q&A forum.  Which is worth more than all the tools in the world put together IMO.

[randfish]

Thanks dMa - very glad to hear it. If there's things you think are missing or that can be improved upon, please let us know. Still in beta, obviously, and there are a number of new features and data improvements coming, but we're hoping to regain the lead in the link tool space (I'm with you, it's been way too long).

[dMaLasp]

Many thanks for the update.

To be honest, I've always found OSE less useful for backlink analysis than some other tools available on the market like Ahrefs or Majestic, but Link Explorer seems to have reached the quality level of these other tools.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

I was waiting for this update, really useful and necessary ....good for you guys

[randfish]

Thanks! Look forward to your thoughts on how this new version works for you/your business.

[randfish]

Hi Gary - yes! That's what the thread I posted above includes - details on what the differences between this new index and tool are vs. the old one. The bullet points basically cover it

[LureCreative]

Nice! Excited to check this out more. Thanks for always keeping your best tools up-to-date and improving on them!

[GaryVlewis]

What exactly the difference between Open Site Explorer and Link Explorer?

Could you please share some pointers on it?

[randfish]

Sweet! Glad to hear it John - let us know if items come up that you'd like to see improved upon.

[JohnMondt]

Awesome update. I find the new Link Explorer much easier to use than the OSE. I also LOVE the fact that it updates daily. It helps when you can see your progress more than once every month or two. I do feel like I notice the difference in speed as well, I am able to quickly navigate through the tool and see the data I need to see.

I'm happy to see this improvement and look forward to what the future of LE holds!

[randfish]

Thanks Ed, really appreciate it (and fascinating to hear how much progress you've made on the solving query intent side! That's awesome).

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Just to be clear i’m talking about other tools (your competitors) losing the plot not the other tools in moz - searcher task accomplishment was a real game changer for us and I’ve got real data to show that it’s a real thing.  We have a ‘veneers cost’ page that’s ranking number one nationally and I’ve looked at what users do on the page with hotjar recordings and they land, scroll to the price comparison part and literally spend 20 seconds there and then bounce.  So it’s got a super high bounce rate, really low time on site, no links (apart from internal ones) but it’s answering the query super fast so is our most popular (and valuable) page by miles (because I retarget them with adwords and paid social).  Like the ‘why adwords fail’ strategy. That’s working for us straight off the bat.  Half of our entire sites traffic comes from that one page with 90% BR and 20s Time on site.

I cant think of how you might measure sonething like that apart from it just sticking out like a sore thumb with its massive traffic in spite of having such an abnormal ux profile compared with my  ‘high quality pages’ that seem to be ranking  with links, time on site, bouncerate and engagement seeming to be the important things that make a difference.

im also a really  chuffed about how much you care about your own users and what we think. That’s a rare quality in business. Especially digital.  Keep building this amazing stuff for us!

[randfish]

Thanks for the feedback Ed! I agree with you that in addition to link metrics, Moz needs to get better at measuring on-page factors like searcher task accomplishment and markup and relevance to the query intent. Those are (hopefully) on the plates of team members at the company.

[randfish]

Well, we still have some features to add and some kinks to work out, but yes, in the near future, if this beta goes well, we'll be replacing Open Site Explorer entirely (we may archive it in its current state, with the current index, for a while before killing it entirely, depending on feedback).

I agree it's awkward having both scores, but hopefully it's also very helpful to observe (as you did), that the new one has much better correlation. Just know that links aren't everything in the Google algo! Thus DA/PA can't be expected to perform perfectly in ranking predictions -- they're still just one element.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

i thought this too - about the two metrics.  But one is much more accurate than the other so even though it hurts me in my heart to have lost a few DA points - it's the more accurate metric and I'd rather see the better picture so I can allocate resources better.  For example some of my competition who are right up snapping at my heels in the serps have now got a higher DA than me and that means I'm not not looking at improving on site so much as looking at their link profiles and trying to discover where that linkjuice might be coming from.

Just think of it as two sets of data, one old (and not as accurate) and the other improved (and more accurate) so you ignore the old in favour of the new.  I'd expect lots of backlash from webmasters who are overly reliant on links and DA which are themselves becoming less relevant in comparison to user experience, 'searcher task accomplishment' and trying to order your link hierarchy to work with the intricacies of rankbrain to avoid internal conflict and make sure google understands your pages with data markup.  All these are bigger on my priorities list than links but links are always there in the background as something you need to focus on but in a real world PR type of way more than ever now.

Plus some of the other tools I use have just lost the plot entirely since the latest algorithm shifts. They have become almost obsolete. I won' name names. unless you want to hear my experiences. I don't think that's professional to do in public. but email me (on my profile)  Because I've been all over the latest changes and have been intimately involved with a few other tracking, link monitoring and competitor analysis companies and their own little updates and betas.  They seem to be struggling with a whole load of stuff at the moment - especially determining the quality of links.

[wheelchairtravel]

Hi Rand, I have long been frustrated with OSE and the DA metric, as it gave sites that I dominate in search visibility much higher scores. This update has fixed that, and my sites now have DA scores that more accurately reflect their position on Google. Will the OSE soon be archived? I am concerned by the potential for confusion among advertisers and marketers alike in having two different DA scores floating around.

[randfish]

Thanks Ed! Agree that this has been a long time coming (we've been working on this particular iteration of the tech underlying our link index for 18 months, and on trying to get here for almost 7 years!). Glad to hear it's looking good to you. There's even more features and improvement to come, but yeah, I'm super proud of the team for all the hard work, and especially for how screaming fast they've made it to access trillions of individual links. That's no easy problem

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

First of all thank you for doing this.  The new interface looks great from what I can see.  And the changes I see are instinctively what I would have expected - having been studying my small niche in a little corner of the Internet very closely for years.

After the recent tidal wave of google updates I was really getting worried that my suite of SEO tools was becoming less accurate and I was seeing more anomalies and differences between sources of data.  This is extremely accurate though from what I can see.

The results I'm now seeing are completing the story and appear - at first glance - much better than before.  I cannot imagine the amount of work that's gone into this project but once again thank you Rand and the whole team for giving us the tools and opportunity to stay ahead of the game.

[tawnycase]

Hi there, Joy! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. 
Thanks so much for reaching out! I’m so glad to hear you’re exploring the new Link Explorer tool!

The way we index the web for Link Explorer is a bit different than the way we index for Open Site Explorer. With OSE, the index updates only about once a month whereas new data is added to Link Explorer every day. The index for Link Explorer is a different index than the Mozscape index used for OSE and includes a lot more data — we’re seeing more of the web with the new index which is helping to provide more accurate data on which to base these metrics.

In addition, the algorithm we use to calculate DA has been updated with this new index to better correlate with Google’s actual ranking standards so we can provide a more accurate representation of a site’s potential ability to rank.

We definitely recommend using the new Link Explorer tool as we do consider it to be much more accurate.

I hope this helps to answer your questions and please feel free to send any others our way! You can drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll get right to your question. Cheers!

[randfish]

Hi Joy - yes, that's correct. The new DA you see in Link Explorer has a stronger correlation with Google's rankings (which is our bar for performance). Don't forget, too, that this new DA updates daily and is derived from a much, much larger group of links and sites (20X+ what OSE uses) than the previous index. So we're discovering a lot more links (to you and your competition), and we're using a better machine-learning system to calculate a score that's more representative of how the sites are likely to perform in Google's rankings (at least, based on the link metrics side of things).

[JoyAumann]

Hi Rand, I'm finding a four point DA difference for my own domain but up to 10 point difference with other domains between the OSE and the new Beta.  Are you saying the new beta is much more accurate?