The New Link Explorer (which will replace Open Site Explorer) is Now in Beta
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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.
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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!
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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.Â
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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:
- 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.
- 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!
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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?
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Thanks Adam!
Re: 1) There is a toggle in the panel above the link lists to filter out common syndication and shortening URLs. Maybe try checking that? If it's not catching everything, let us know what (here or via a ticket to help@moz.com) and we can try adding those to the filtration.
Re: 2) Yeah - we have the "linking domains" view in the tool but adding a "one link per domain" or "up to X link per domain" in the links view is certainly something we can consider, too.
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Thanks Ajaz - outside of this beta product, all the other spots in Moz Pro will still use the DA scores (and link counts) from OSE (including Mozbar). Once we launch publicly, that'll change to the new one though.
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Can I please ask (while you're here Rand) what's the position with Mobile results in Moz generally? Even before Mobile first Indexing I set my Moz data to the Google Mobile en-GB because 80% of my users were using their phones to access my site even two years ago. What precisely does that Mobile en-GB mean? And has the mobile first index had anything to do with the links beta or is it just a totally separate subject? Sorry if this is a dumb question.
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Funny you should ask
Russ Jones from the Moz team has been working on testing a mobile-first type of index for link data to see what that does to the link graph. He should have a post out before not too long on that topic.As for what mobile en-GB means as a setting in Moz Analytics, it's basically where/how we rank track - the geography and language that's used to check rankings (in your case "En - English" and "GB - Great Britain").
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Some of your competitors in the competitive intelligence space (not naming names) are recording 3,900 keywords on the desktop then for the mobile it's a whopping 33 keywords. So it just seems broken and pointless to have on there.  Perhaps the roll-out was a bit Rushed.
 But that's different, they are picking up keywords for intel rather than us inputing the keywords we need to track. But it's dumb to have stuff that doesn't work live on your site. The only thing upsetting people in this beta is losing a couple of precious DA points or having to explain it to their clients. That's a win for you. Look how important your metric has become. Half the people I speak to think DA is actually a Google metric. I look forward to the post. Thanks again. -
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.
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It amazes me how many people/clients want to track DA as a KPI for their SEO efforts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thanks Andrew! We're very glad to have that in the product, too. Been far too long
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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!
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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.
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Thanks Clive! Thrilled to hear it's been helpful for you. I'm excited to see it get even better
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