Have Questions about the Jan. 27th Mozscape Index Update? Get Answers Here!

[randfish]

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.

[MattAntonino]

I don't have a specific question, just a WOW!  I remember when the index was getting smaller & smaller as you guys went through some "figuring out" of how exactly you would index the whole internets. It has come back in SUCH a big way!

I was thinking of your "false narratives" /rand blog post and how things didn't always go the way you wanted. OSE's limits have always been one of those "not the way I wanted it to be" with Moz and this size of update is an AMAZING comeback.

So, no question - just a bit of a "great job, team!" to get the index to this size. Can't wait for EVEN MORE.

[MonicaOConnor]

I second that opinion, super exciting to get deeper information! Can't wait to dive in!

[randfish]

Thanks Matt I'm proud of the team's work on growing the index thus far. I think we've reached the top of where we can go with the current index's infrastructure, so I'd expect sizes will stay in this range for the next 5-6 updates at least.

For the last 4 years, we have been working on a new infrastructure for our indices - something closer to what Google does with real-time processing via caffeine (though not quite as robust), and we're planning to launch that in Q4 of this year, at which time, our index can grow much bigger and much faster (it'll also be fresher, included lots more kinds of data, etc). That system also won't be limited by software (which holds us back today), but rather by hardware (which we can and will buy more of). I really can't wait for that