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

[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.

[AdamThompsonSSL]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[randfish]

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

[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!

[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.

[randfish]

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

[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?

[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

[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

[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.

[Andrew-SEO]

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

[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.