In lue of the canceled Moz Index update

[SundownerRV]

Hey Moz, Overall we love your product and are using it daily to help us grow, part of that has been to rely on the Moz Index for DA and PA as well as places where we are doing positive linking through genuine partnerships and reviews of clients. We were really excited to see any the results for this month as we have been partner linked from lots of high reputation sites and google seems to agree as our rankings are moving up weekly.

The question from our marketing team is, since a significant part of Moz will not be available to us this month, will there be any compensation handed out to the paying community.

PS: I am an engineer and I know how you have probably lost a very large set of data which cant simply be re-crawled over night but Moz Pro is not a cheap product and we do expect it to work.

Source: https://moz.com/products/api/updates

Kind Regards.

[KyleEaves]

It happens almost every time they set a date to release an Index Update. Usually they just push it back a week or two, then do it again, finally releasing the updates weeks after it was initially scheduled. This time they took a different approach and cancelled it all together.

I love MOZ for keyword rank tracking, keyword difficulty, etc, but have almost given up on their Indexes. There seems to be no consistency with the bank link data from one index to the next anyway, so you're really only able to measure relative changes in backlink profiles against competitors. Getting index updates when they're scheduled seems to be a rare occurrence these days, so you may want to get used to not getting data when expected, and I highly doubt there will be any compensation.

I understand we are talking about huge amounts of data... a huge undertaking that can't be easy. My advice to MOZ on the index updates, under promise and over deliver, not the other way around. Just tell us the next Index Update will be in two months, then release it in a month and a half (or on time) and everyone will be happy you came out with it early. Much better than stringing everyone along with expectations of an update then hearing another excuse the day after the update is cancelled/postponed.

Hopefully they can get this figured out and prevent future issues with index updates and customer frustration with this part of the product.

[randfish]

I can't help but agree with you. Over the last few years, we've consistently had terrible delays releasing indexes, and despite a team of people way smarter and more talented than me working their tails off to get it right, we haven't had success making it work regularly yet.

This latest index cancellation is embarassing and it sucks. We produced an index, but when we looked at it, a huge problem had arisen that we couldn't see until processing was complete (another problem with our indices is our inability to get a good sense of what they'll look like until they're done which takes 20+ days of processing after a crawl). I'll detail that in a Q+A thread soon (once I get the full rundown and plan from our Big Data team) and then share around.

In any case, you have my sincere apologies and deep regrets. We'll keep trying to get this right, but just FYI - we've simultaneously been building a new index system that's more real-time (like Google's, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc) that can still calculate metrics like MozRank and Page Authority. We've made a lot of progress on it, but it's still probably 6+ months away from launching, so we'll have to deal with the old Mozscape system until then.

[SundownerRV]

Thanks, I wont be giving up my subscription just yet as I think the work Moz does in terms of whiteboard fridays and everything else is worth it. I have spoken to your live help and reached a more than satisfiable outcome. Just a fruit for thought, the crawlers should be running 24/7 365 days and doing less work over a longer period, my job is a big data Analytics engineer / DevOps and this helped us solve a ton of issues at the petabyte scale.