Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Why are Majestic Backlink counts Bigger?
We have had a few support calls asking us why our backlink counts are different to other providers and search engines. The purpose of this post is to explain the potential difference in link counts.
Firstly and most importantly, most of the major backlinks providers and search engines run their own crawler. Our crawler is independent of the others, and has its own set of rules ( algorithms ) that may result in it wandering around the Web in a different way to the others – hence it would be very unlikely that two backlink counts from two independent providers would be the same.
In the “External Backlinks” count on the search engine ( see http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/search?folder=&q=www.majesticseo.com ) we include almost all the external links we find – including “no follows” and “deleted” – for registered users though, we also include a breakdown of these counts for better comparison. The one type of link we exclude in this count is “mentions” – “mentions” refer to where a site or URL is mentioned on a page, but is not actually a link. We will return to mentions shortly.
Majestic SEO site statistics
The “External Backlinks” count is where the strength of our historical data comes in. The Graph on the search page shows the profile of links discovery at page level. For Majestic you can see a large spike in backlinks around June last year. This is where the free registration again yields benefit. When ‘logged in’, viewing the backlinks history provides hints to the answer – Majestic SEO has had a steady domain growth, which indicates that the spike may have been due to an increase in the number of links, rather than the number of sites linking into Majestic SEO – an advanced report will let you find out more about this – but that may be for another article.
Backlinks history graph for Majestic SEO
Returning to the theme of the post – “Why are the Majestic Link counts higher than search engine X”, For starters, Majestic SEO is a specialised backlinks product. Unlike the household name search engines, we do not need to process full text searches. The lack of this distraction means we can concentrate our efforts on the index of the links, which in turn means we can have a more comprehensive data set. You can read more about this in a piece of analysis we did a few years ago – Majestic Competitor Analysis.
Another question frequently asked is “Why include dead backlinks in the counts?”. Well, when we detect such links we do mark them as deleted, but Majestic is not a link checker – indeed, given the size of our index we have to stagger our recrawls to ensure we do not put too much load on any one site. This means there may be a period between crawls when the link disappears and we have no way of knowing it. This is where advanced reports come to the rescue again – by specifying a recent date range in the “Source URL Options” section of the Advanced Report – Report Analysis Options screen. This can be used to limit the data in the advanced report to the last ( for example ) two months. The summary screen on the advanced Report gives a breakdown of all the numbers which enables a comparative analysis with indexes which focus only on recent data.
Filter Crawl Date on Advanced Report
I promised earlier to return to mentions. In early 2009 it became apparent that the Majestic Data was appearing distorted by the inclusion of mentions in the dataset. We then took the decision to remove mentions from the totals on the website. Later we defaulted advanced reports to remove mentions, together with “no follows” and “deleted” links by default – though it is possible to include them in the options section of the advanced report.
I hope that explains why our backlink counts may be different to those seen on other sites, and demonstrated some of different ways to “dig deeper” into the headline counts.
Increase in the standard rate of VAT to 20 per cent
Dear customers,
The United Kingdom’s Government made decision to increase standard rate of VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent on 4 January 2011 (see more from the source). This tax only applies to sales made to European Union based individuals and companies that are not VAT registered. All other countries such as the United States of America are unaffected.
Our existing web customers who have already subscribed before today will be pleased to hear that we will absorb this VAT increase so that the amount you pay is not changed!
Second index update in December 2010
We’ve released our new index update with data up to 16th of December 2010. You might notice that search results as well as reports will have fresher dates on backlinks – this is result of our new recrawl strategy that we put in place last month. The higher the ACRank of the URL the more frequently it will be recrawled, we also give priority to homepages and subdomains in our recrawl.
One side effect for some sites might be that links found might not grow as fast as before – we will be keeping an eye on it in the following months as we tune up our recrawl strategy to provide a good balance between crawling of newly discovered pages and recrawling of existing pages.
Keep an eye on this blog – we’ll post details here!
Training: Using Clique hunter part 1
Clique Hunter helps you find the links that your competitors are using to get their rankings. This presentation has sound, although you can follow the presentation in full screen mode without sound if you prefer.
Using Clique Hunter Presentation
Last month’s webinar showed users how to use Clique Hunter – but the recording was not very satisfactory. Therefore I have put together this tutorial.
If you like this layout, let us know and we will look at using this method to develop other tutorials along similar lines.
(ADDED: Part 2 is now here)
Other tutorials are available on our How to Videos page.