Author Archive
Majestic Upgrade – Minor on the surface. Huge underneath.
We have take a next step towards making the site a little more intuitive, today. We are also paving the way for some considerably more complex changes coming up.
The most important change for me is to exclude “Nofollows”, “Deleted”, “AltText” and “Mention only” from the default reports after you retrieve the back-link data. We have been carefully noting what people have been saying about Majestic and one criticism has been “the data is out of date”. We have been working hard to make sure that this criticism won’t stick around for long. Investing in servers and infrastructure is part of this, but also – many people take all the links (our bad – now fixed) instead of filtering out the stuff they don’t need for SEO analysis. You can always get the data back, by going into the options panel. Here you will see new domains with the following exclusions by default:
This will reduce the number of links you see, but will concentrate your mind on ones more likely to count.
The summary overview screen will let you know how many backlinks we have excluded for you.
Most Customers to the site may notice it now by the changed “Control Panel Tools” menu.
We previously described the actions a little differently, as well as having the drop down before the domain box. We hope that these three options are more self explanatory than previously. If you are seeing a fourth box above, then you are part of some more advanced work, which should come down the line in a few weeks.
I hope these changes are helpful to people. We’d love your feedback, so I have updated the Poll on the top right of this blog page. Your vote wins nothing, but we do value your opinions!
Dixon.
SearchDNA Sneak Preview
This afternoon, we were given a sneak peak of SearchDNA.net – which was announced officially a few weeks ago. The beta has been in the making over a considerable period, so it is great to see them so close to launch. If you are signed up to the beta, then there are two lists of testers. I think the first will be out in a week or two and will probably be “friends” who will be honest about observing “undocumented features” but the main product should be out pretty soon to the larger beat group. I have no control, but weeks not months.
Certainly, SearchDNA is endeavoring to go deeper into link analysis that anyone in the past and is taking data from several sources – not just Majestic – to develop its offering.
Happy Birthday Majestic
Majestic started crawling the web five years ago today. Happy birthday comments welcome and a massive thank you to everyone that has supported the project for so long.
In celebration of our birthday, we’re planning a nice surprise. Alex is beavering away in Birmingham – so he’s incommunicado – but this might not be the only post today.
Linkdex announces SearchDNA
A new SEO link, commerce, content and contact discovery engine, powered partially by Majestic, SearchDNA.net is now taking beta applications. We are really excited that a second enterprise client has allowed us to announce that they will be using our data.
Linkdex is officially launching during at SMX in New York, announcing on the same day that it has received 650,000 Euros (about US$1,000,000) in funding from amadeus.
SearchDNA plans to really analyze sites in more depth than ever before. With all that funding – and with the help of our data – we are hoping they will be a major force.
Here is a demo:
I have certainly signed up to the beta… I’d suggest any serious SEO companies stay on top of what they are doing too.
Dixon.
Revealing Deleted Links
I just noticed a week old tweet from Kerry Dye, saying that she would love to be able to see deleted links more clearly:
Well Kerry… you can!
How to find links that used to point to a site, but got taken down
It you own the site in question, then this costs nothing – you just need to have the site verified by uploading a verification file. If you have not yet registered on MajesticSEO, it’s free and really quick. If you have also paid to analyze a site, it doesn’t cost at this time to re-force an analysis, to find this out.
Knowing where links have been deleted can be useful – particularly if you have made deals where you expect a link to be maintained, but have not got time to individually go and check every link every week. There are other uses too. If your rankings take a hit one day, it MIGHT be nothing to do with what you have been doing, but it may rather be due to a website that had influence over you through a link updating its own website. As an SEO, you’ll probably take the flack for the ranking drop, even though it was nothing to do with you OR to do woth a change in Google’s algorithm. Unfortunately, Google spiders sites at different times to us, so our dates may not match. This means the best time to run this report is just after we have updated our index.
Here’s what you do.
Assuming you got a site in your control panel, click on the “options” tab in the top left corner.
Select “deleted” in the “include back links with flag” column:
Retrieving a list of deleted links
Then at the bottom of the page, press “save and force analysis”.
Now in your site summary, you will ONLY have a list of links to you site which were crawled initially by our bot, but – when we returned to crawl the page again – had disappeared. From the summary page, you can see these either by anchor text or by originating domain “strength”.
You can drill into these and download into a CSV file if you want to sort and slice and dice your deleted links.
Doing this exercise and grabbing screen shots using the Majesticseo.com domain, I found some interesting insights that I might have to follow up. Some interesting links to Majestic have… disappeared.
Do you think we may be starting to cause some waves?
Dixon.