Yahoo Site Explorer RIP
I believe that there are around 850 thousand unique visitors a month looking at Yahoo’s site explorer. Naturally, its future must be in question given Microsoft’s deal – but even without that, you have to question the wisdom of using Site Explorer, now that Majestic’s data is considerably larger and gives much more information – even without registering. Here is a list of things that we feel Majestic does better than Yahoo Site Explorer:
More Links in the database
For example, as of this post, Site Explorer reports 2.2 million links to www.whitehouse.gov whilst Majestic reports 20.2 million external links. This is partly because we show much more variety of links than Yahoo, but registered members can filter domains under their control for free, to choose only the kinds of links that interest them. (They do need to pay to do this with sites they don’t control, but at least we offer it!)
Yahoo only reports page in-links, not domain in-links
Being told a back-link (in-link) number doesn’t help at all, in itself. One run of site paid link on a third party site can inflate this number in an instant – and when you try to compare back-links using Site Explorer, you usually get meaningless numbers because not all links are considered equal. Knowing how many DOMAINS link to the site you are analyzing is reported straight off the bat in Majestic.
Majestic even reports unique IPs
Sometimes, with a bit of trickery, a black hat or a misguided SEO experiment or for more benign reasons, many of the inbound links might be from different domains, but these domains are all on the same server, using the same I number. This is a pretty straightforward flag for Google or any search engine that the sites are controlled by the same organisation. So right off the bat, we also give you the number of unique IP numbers linking to a domain.
You can see back links by page
Yahoo gives you links into a domain (or to the domain and the sub-domains). Majestic also gives you inbound links to each individual page! What’s more, we give you:
- The relative strength of the page as a result of those links
- The date we last crawled the page
- The number of unique domains that have linked to the page
- The number of unique IP numbers linking to the page
- The total number of links (including internal links) as well as external (shown separately)
- And more! Try a link analysis on a competitor’s domain right now.
And so far, you haven’t even had to register… which is instant and free.
So here’s my question… why is anyone still using Yahoo’s site explorer?
Dixon.
Alex and Dixon on Signing day
When Alex and Myself signed up to each other’s fate, recently, it was after many months of building trust and soul searching. For Alex – renowned control freak – allowing anyone into his small circle of trust was in itself the largest challenge. For me, I’ve been used to being the Managing Director almost ever since I left University in 1988. (Actually… I was Student’s Union President for a year… but that’s just being an MD with a massive socialist board of directors.)
Alex Chudnovsky (left) and Dixon Jones (right)
Agreements and partnerships done on a whim don’t tend to work too well, in my experience. Also working with friends and family. Alex and I went to quite some length to make sure we didn’t do this on a whim. We met in February for the first time – but we did share common goals for Majestic and we spent many, many hours in a coffee shop at Milton Keynes station, pouring over plans and legal documents, trying to get the goals to converge and setting up a strategy to bring Majestic to market. I’m sure that in working together, Alex and I will become the best of friends – but for now it is all business.
Dixon.
New site design
We’ve just launched new web site design, we’ll retheme this blog shortly inline with new look and feel on the main website. Please tell us your views on it – vote in the poll shown to the right of this post!
If you preferred old fonts used for reports then don’t worry – we’ll include font customisation option next week.
Enterprise API ready to launch
I’m excited to say that we are today announcing that we are ready to offer the use of our Enterprise API with other SEO tool companies and agencies. We are planning two levels of Enterprise API service in the short term for Majestic:
- An reseller version of the API for developers planning to repurpose and resell our data
- An SEO/SEM Agency version of the API for heavy users wishing to use link data for their client reports
These APIs are far more advanced than the previous API available, since they will include data like external anchor text; discovery dates; follow/nofollow attributes; image links and several other filters and variables to help developers filter out the links that are most important to them.
Reseller license for the API
This is our most immediate initiative, because it will allow other companies to build their own tools. We know that there are a number of really cool SEO tools and competitive intelligence tools out there, which could be enhanced by taking our backlink data, using it to add value to their offering, and come up with something new. We don’t want to sell on reseller rights out to companies that will simply reconstitute our own data, but if you have a great technology and reasonable funding to be able to take our data to the next level, them I am guessing that you’ll probably have someone at SES in San Jose if you are serious. Track me down (I’m Dixon Jones, you’ll find me on the speaker roster or catch me via twitter.com/receptional ) and let’s have a serious talk. I will be in San Jose all week and in Seattle at the start of next week in case anyone is based there. Let’s see what we can do. I’ll come armed with some API screenshots and you can see just how much detail you can extract out of our database at this time.
SEO/SEM Agency license for the API
We expect to license more of these, as I imagine there will be many agencies who do work for their own retained clients and would benefit from combining our data with their reporting systems. Access to this license will still be a reasonably significant monthly retainer – but considerably less than the reseller API license. A key drawback is that the contract will absolutely restrict license users from creating web based tools available to the general public via this API – but this is unlikely to be a drawback for most reputable agencies, who are generally not targeting this retail market.
Apart from the web based interface, our APIs are going to be initially on a contract by contract basis.
Majestic SEO appoint Receptional to oversee worldwide marketing expansion
Majestic SEO announces today a partnership with Receptional in a long term agreement to market the largest commercially available database map of links on the Internet.
Majestic SEO has developed the largest index of links on the Internet through a distributed search engine over a four year period and now boasts an index that is estimated to three times the size of Search giant Yahoo, with 697 billion urls spidered compared to an unofficial estimate of 200 billion urls indexed by Yahoo. Google is believed to have reached a trillion (1,000 billion) URLs.
Majestic SEO’s database enables its customers to use the database to understand how web sites and affiliates link to competitors. The data is used to help understand how search engines rank one website above another and is also used for a variety of other competitor and market research tasks.
Receptional will work with Majestic SEO to develop agreements with both retail users and commercial users of its database. Receptional will also help to develop worldwide penetration of Majestic’s services including the USA. In the partnership arrangement, Receptional’s Dixon Jones will join Majestic SEO’s founder, Alex Chudnovsky, on the board of Majestic SEO limited. The agreement is designed to develop the business dramatically over several years. A website redesign and commercially available API are two of the first steps in developing Majestic SEO’s markets.