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 help@moz.com, or send feedback through the feedback form in Link Explorer.

[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?

[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).

[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 help@moz.com and we'll get right to your question. Cheers!

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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]

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

[GaryVlewis]

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

Could you please share some pointers on it?

[LureCreative]

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

[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

[randfish]

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

[Roman-Delcarmen]

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

[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.