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Google’s Strongest Current Backlinks

Back in January we revealed Google’s top 50,000 strongest backlinks. Back then, we had not released our FRESH Index Now we have, we can give you an even better list.

We are pleased to give you Google’s Strongest backlinks seen by our crawlers in the last 30 days. To keep the list clean, we have chosen to release the strongest link only from each of nearly 30,000 referring domains. We sorted the referring domains based on the number of referring sub-nets to those domains. This reduces undue influence from site-wide links and home grown referring domains.  These are free for you to download from the bottom of this post – no login required. If you do any analysis on the data though, be sure to tell people who you got the data from, please.

Some interesting obsevations about the top 50,000 links to Google are:

• Well over 60% of the links were seen or revisited by our crawlers less than 24 hours before we pulled down the data.
• One of top three strongest links based on ACRank is a subdomain: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ 
• Seth Godin has way too much influence.
• PSU thinks Google IS the World Wide Web according their anchor text.

Some of the anchor text is listed with ?? Question marks. This is not an error in the Majestic data. We accurately collected the anchor text, but it is in a UTF-8 character set not generally recognized by Unicode during the conversion to CSV. Typically Chinese or Japanese characters, for example. The web interface at Majestic SEO shows the correct anchor text for Eastern and other character types if you want this level of data.

Download Now

You can download the top 30,000 backlinks to Google in this CSV file.

Majestic SEO updates this data up to three times a day – so it differs from day to day. If you would like top analyze the baclink profile of other sites, our subscriptions start at less than 50 dollars a month.

Link Building Secrets Presentation

Majestic SEO’s Brand New Feature

You asked for it, so we finally added it. You can choose the period of time to view the back link history graph over. This feature has been added to the Backlink History Checker and will give you access to a wider range of information regarding how many different websites have and are linking to your site.

I would assume that the majority of you reading this are already familiar with how the Backlink History Checker works, so in that case I will go straight into explaining how this new feature works. When using the backlink history checker previously, you would only be able to check a limited range of information in terms of how far you could go back. But now, with the ability to go back one, two or five years you can compare exactly how well you are doing in line with your competitors. You can also see EXACTLY the times of year where the amount of sites linking to your site is at its peak and also the times of year where the links drop. This information will also be available about your competitors too.

Once you have put the five web domains that you wish to compare and clicked the compare button, you should be taken to a page that looks like the screen shot below. The only possible way to access the newest feature is to make sure that you are using ‘Historic Data’. Once you have selected ‘Historic Data’, a new button will appear. This button (highlighted in the box), is where the option to go back one, two or five years is located.

To give you an example of what the new graphs will look like, the screen shot above is comparing over five years, five different news websites. As you can see, the blue line (bbc.co.uk) is peaking between July and October each year since 2008, whereas the Washington Post (red line) and the Daily Mail (dark blue line) stay relatively flat throughout the year. Without Majestic SEO’s newest feature, this information would not have been available to you.

The update to the Backlink History Checker is available right now. So next time you want to check any backlinks to your site, make sure you take advantage of this brilliant new addition to the service. You won’t regret it.

Go to the tool and try it out here.

New Majestic SEO Ambassador in Brazil

Majestic is pleased to have Alberto André as a new Majestic SEO Ambassador.

Alberto runs a number of conferences in Brazil. We hope that he will be able to help users in Brazil, where we already have a burgeoning presence.

You can find Alberto on Twitter or see his profile and his company om the Ambassadors page.

Majestic’s Ambassors are volunteers willing to help us take our message to the world. We hope they will be able to represent us at events locally – but please bear in mind that they are not employees of Majestic SEO – so they cannot always help you out in every situation. On the plus side, Alberto can at least speak Portuguese!

How Fresh is their Index? Actually?

How do you test how fresh a search index’s data is?

We decided to check – for ourselves – exactly how fresh (or stale) data is in various indexes around the web. We’ll show you comparison data for an example checked this morning (19th September 2011).

We are going to compare:

• MajesticSEO Fresh Index
• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing

The example website that we will be using at this stage is http://status.aws.amazon.com/.

If you don’t care about the methodology – only the research output… here you go:

Here’s exactly how we got this data. There are a few steps that you will need to take, which I will take you through right now.

Finding a base line

Right now, http://status.aws.amazon.com/ shows today’s date in its title. That’s a great place to start, because nobody is going to say that Amazon is likely to try to manipulate the date, so every time an index updates, you’ll see the date that the page was actually crawled in the title, regardless of when the new information becomes live. Once you have the example web page up, right click on your mouse and select ‘View Page Source’. A separate box should pop up (like the one in the picture).

There you will need to look for the title that any and every crawler will see. (The title is highlighted in the picture). So in this case, the title for this particular page is ‘AWS Service Health Dashboard – Sep 19, 2011’. The date will change depending on the day that you complete this action.

Testing Majestic SEO Fresh Index

Now that you have found a base line, you just need to check this against all the indexes of the web that you would like. So for Majestic SEO, go to majesticseo.com and enter the address http://status.aws.amazon.com/ into the bar and press explore. You should get this:

Hopefully, you should come to a page that gives information on the web sites Backlink History, Referring Domains and Top Backlines; basically it is a complete summary of the web domain that you want information on. If you don’t, try logging in first!

The picture above shows the title of the web domain, it’s URL, the date that it was last crawled, its External Backlinks and the number of Referring Domains. So this example website was last crawled one day ago on 18th September 2011 and has 1,062 Referring Domains – but the TITLE says that the crawl date was actually the 17th. It is perhaps our own bad luck that our crawlers are using London time and Amazon is using a US time. Otherwise the crawl date in our system and the date in the page title should be the same. But we want to compare like with like, and the Amazon title is the base line, so we’ll take the 17th September as the ACTUAL crawl date, using Amazon’s server time.

Testing Google

After testing Majesticseo.com you will need to test Google. Type in the same URL into the Google search bar, the same information should match with the picture below.

From this picture, the information that Google gives you is spot on with today’s date. In fact, the information was last updated two hours ago (from when this was written). Interestingly, if you were to grab the “cache” of Google’s data set, it suggests the cached information is sometimes older, but again – let’s go like for like, using the independence of Amazon’s title as the baseline.

Testing Yahoo

Once you have tested Google, the next step is to test Yahoo.com. Once you are there, you will again need to type in the same link that has been used in the first, second and third steps. At the very top of the page, you will see the information you will need.

The information that yahoo.com has given can be seen above. The date given by Yahoo for the same link (all this information was collected on the 19th September) is September 14th, so that is around five days ago!

Testing Bing

The final step in collecting this information is to go onto bing.com. Again, you will need to type in the same link here. Once you have done that, a page should appear that looks like the one below.

The title here is still the same as it is in each of the other steps, but the date given by bing.com, is the 15th September. This is still nearer to today’s date than Yahoo, but is not as up to date as Majestic or Google.

In Conclusion

You can see exactly what index, gives you the freshest data and which gives you the most out of date without having to rely on claims. As the table shows, the method that gave the most out of date information is Yahoo – whilst Google.com, gave the most up to date information. The information was updated two hours before this post was written. Majestic SEO gave the second most up to date information, beating Bing, and Yahoo by several days.