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

[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.

[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).

[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 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]

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. 

[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!

[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?