Majestic SEO Blog

Archive for the ‘Training’ Category

Site Explorer Tutorial

The Site Explorer is an essential analysis tool from Majestic SEO that allows users to view a wide variety of information about a websites backlink data all in one go. This tutorial video explains the functions available in the Site Explorer and an explanation of the data available to users.

You can see a list of “How to” video tutorials here.

Bulk Backlink Tutorial

The Bulk Backlink Checker is essential to find out the key backlink information from the broad range of websites you want to compare. This short video will explain how to use the Majestic Tool and how we can use this information in Excel to gain a greater understanding of link building strategies.

Speakers are recommended, but the essential learnings are also shown in text on the video.

You can see a list of “How to” video tutorials here.

Registering and using Majestic SEO for the first time

This video has now been superceded. Please see the newer version here.

If you want to know what Majestic SEO is all about, how to use it and some understanding of what it can do for you, this tutorial is only about 5 minutes long and will help you to get started. Whilst speakers or headphones are helpful, the most important points are also provided in text on the tutorial.

SES New York Discount Voucher Code

Majestic SEO will be presenting in London and exhibiting in New York at Search Engine Strategies this year.

This is on top of Sphinncon earlier in January and Thinkvisibility in Leeds in March.

Here is a discount codes for SES New York: 21st-25th March 2011. Get 20% off using the voucher code 20MAJE.

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.