Christmas Cracker 10: Historic vs Fresh
The Fresh Index is usually the best for analyzing links currently in existence and valid. But sometimes you want to know all those dirty secrets that caused people to clean up and retrench. Here’s how.
More Christmas Crackers here.
Christmas Countdown 9th Dec: Using Majestic More Efficiently
Did you know that Majestic SEO lets you analyse DEEP URLs, not just home pages? If you start with analysing a DEEP URL, you’ll get the domain and subdomain data in a standard report too! Here is how:
For more Christmas Cracker tip videos, check out the Majestic Youtube channel.
Christmas Countdown 8th Dec: A site’s best back links
This short video shows how subscribers (Silver and above) quickly see any competitor’s strongest backlinks – day after day. Even silver users can check up to ten URLs every hour.
More tomorrow. Or check the other Christmas video tips this month.
Christmas Countdown 7th Dec: Back link History Checker
This is one of our most popular tools. possibly our MOST popular free tool – tracking several competitors over time.
For other videos, check out Majestic’s Youtube channel.
Fresh Index opened up for Free Users
Today we are letting ALL users get full link data for their own sites from our Fresh Index. Previously – whilst everyone could see the LINK COUNTS to any site for free, non-paying users could only get reports for their own sites from the historic index. Now – by default – all reports will be on the Fresh Index although all users will be able to switch back to the Historic index should they ever have need to do so.
How do you get a FREE link report?
1: You need to first be registered and logged in to a free (or paid) account. That is simply a case of verifying your email. Paid accounts can still get reports for their own sites without these reports coming out of your paid subscription.
2: Type your own site’s URL into the search bar and then click on one of the scroll (report) symbols on the page of results – as shown on the image.
You will then be asked whether you own the site and if so you will be given the opportunity to get the report for free.
From there you will be given a verification file which you will need to upload to your root directory to prove that the site is yours to manage. In the future we will look at other verification methods, but at this time you will need to have access to your site to be able to verify your site and have a free report.
Once Verified you will be able to run the reports for your site – both Standard and Advanced. In a Standard Report on a free account you are able to see the top 5000 links (Yahoo only ever showed you 1000) and can filter these on the fly. Some of the things you can see are:
- Anchor text
- Source URL
- NoFollow / Image / Redirection flags
- Last Seen date
- ACRank (An indication of how many sites link to the source URL)
- Export to CSV
You can see much more in advanced reports.
Why use the Fresh Index?
The Fresh Index gets updated every day! If a link is worth its salt, it will be in there – whether it is new or has been around for years. Infact – you will often find a link there before you even find it in Google’s Webmaster Tools. (We would love users to test this for us.)
Why release Fresh Data for Free accounts now?
There are two reasons. The first is that we closely monitor good and bad comments about Majestic SEO around the world as any self respecting brand should strive to do. Whilst we find our customers generally think we have the strongest link data in the world, it seems there is a significant minority that felt our data contained lots of dead links. Maybe two years ago that was true, but not since the launch of our Fresh Index. When we analyzed who was saying this, it was typically one of two types of people. Those that used the “Historic” index because it simply showed higher link counts without considering the quality advantages of the more modern fresh index or more often people who were not paying customers who had little choice but to look at the historic index. Clearly, free users data for free is intended to help users like what we have – so not giving users the good stuff just wasn’t clever. So now even free subscribers get the best 
The other reason was to stop a trend. We are noticing that since the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer, many services are battening down the hatches and making their data harder to access. We wanted to go the other way.