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An Index of the World Wide Web – 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape
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Linkscape – a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value.
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A Fresh Design – that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience
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New Features for PRO Membership – including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more.
Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion:
SEOmoz's Index of the Web
For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics:
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Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site.
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1.83% of all links on the web are nofollowed and of these, 61% are external-pointing, while 39% link to pages on their own site. While those percentages may seem small, that's a massive number (~2 billion links) that are leveraging nofollow for link juice "sculpting."
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While 0.08% of pages on the web use the 301 redirect, 0.12% (nearly twice as many) employ 302 redirects. Another 0.005% use the meta refresh.
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About 1.5% of all pages use the meta noindex tag (which is a lot of content the engines don't get to see) and 0.87% of all pages use the meta nofollow tag.
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From our entire index of pages, the median page received about 77 links (both internal and external), while the average page gets 32. If your pages have more than 32 links, congratulations! You're above average :-)
Over time, we hope to answer hundreds of questions that the major engines, due to their penchant for secrecy, have kept under wraps. We'll also be offering custom data reports for companies that would like to retrieve more specific information from our index.
Along with all the exciting possibilities for leveraging this resource comes an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. SEOmoz's index is by no means perfect or complete, but I have been shocked, time and again, at the degree to which the data has provided exceptional valuable. Some things to be aware of, however, include:
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Domain Diversity over Domain Breadth
Our crawl biases towards having pages and data from as many domains as possible, rather than intensely and exhaustively indexing every URL on a single domain. Over time, we hope to do both, but in order to provide site owners with valuable data early on, this was our initial focus. -
Concentration on the “Center” of the Web
As others who've invested energy into crawling the web in academia have noted, the Internet's pages fit a bow tie-like pattern of a well-connected center (where many links exist between sites and pages) and two external sides where links largely flow one way (either in, towards the center, or out from it). Both as a result of this pattern and because we feel that the most valuable data comes from the most important and well-connected (and connecting) pages, our crawl biases towards this “center” of the well-linked web. -
Index Freshness
Our process for crawling the web and making our data available requires significant processing resources (as a comparison, back in 2002, when Google's stated index comprised fewer than 5 billion URLs, they appeared to only compute data once each month, resulting in what SEOs termed the “Google Dance”). Thus, SEOmoz's index generally contains crawl information between 10-50 days in age. Moving forward, we'll continue to refine freshness and, hopefully, have enough commercial success with the product to invest in better and faster crawling and processing. -
Index Size
Over the past few weeks, we've run thousands of tests, and come to the general conclusion that SEOmoz's index contains between 1/3 to 1/5 the URLs of the major search engines. When comparing link numbers or data counts, this should be expected. Fortunately, it appears that nearly universally, the SEOmoz index contains the more important, well-linked-to pages and sites, so the missing portions in a comparison are unlikely to be popular, valuable resources. -
Subtle Differences with the Major Search Engines
In comparing our crawls against the engines, we have noticed a small number of sites and pages that “cloak” or display content in different ways to different crawlers. While this represents an infinitesimally small percentage of URLs, it's worth noting that Googlebot (and to a lesser extent, Yahoo!'s Slurp and Live's MSNbot) see a slightly different web than other crawlers.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing more information about our crawl and asking for your feedback, too. Until then, we've got some additional, in-depth resources in the Linkscape education center.
Linkscape: Online Access to the Web's Link Graph
Linkscape is the tool I've been lusting for since first getting into the SEO world. It's a truly extensible, usable, fully-featured link research system accompanied by some impressive link-based metrics.
The primary metric Linkscape exposes is mozRank (abbreviated mR), which we've been using internally with great success for the last few months. Like other link popularity metrics (Google's PageRank, Yahoo!'s old WebRank, Live's StaticRank, etc.), mozRank relies on the intuition that links are votes and that links from more important sources should carry more weight. As of today, mozRank isn't perfect, but it does include substantive differences from the algorithms discussed above (and those mentioned in academic papers) that helps mozRank to reward natural linking and discount many of the more flagrant manipulative link behaviors we found.
Linkscape also features lots of other valuable metrics, including mozTrust (abbreviated mT and inspired by the TrustRank paper), a link popularity metric similar to mozRank, differing only in that it has a built-in bias towards trusted links and those that earn them); Domain mozRank (DmR) & Domain mozTrust (DmT), which calculate mozRank and mozTrust on the domain level (rather than just for individual pages) to learn about which domains carry the most link popularity and trust. There's also a host of individual attributes like image links, links with nofollow, links in noscript tags, links from the same IP address or C-block of IPs and many more. A full list of link attributes is available here.
What does this mean? It means that I can perform a search like this one:
This shows me only those links that come from pages with "seo" in the anchor text and then sorts to show only the links which are embedded in images or come from the same IP C-block or ... well, lots of stuff.
This type of advanced link information has, in my opinion, always been critical to the SEO process, both for self-examination and for competitive analysis. It's almost a crime that we've had to perform link-related SEO tasks without it, so as much as I'm excited to offer this tool to other SEOs, I'm equally thrilled to finally have it for our own clients and projects. It even shows the distribution of anchor text, like this list of anchor text links pointing to SEOmoz's SEO Expert Quiz:
I could go on about Linkscape for ages, and I probably will in future blog posts, pointing out all the shady links we've uncovered, which types of badges are most likely to be adopted from viral campaigns, and why the search engines might be ranking particular sites and pages where they do, but for now, I suggest you explore the tool on your own. The only final note I'll add is that Linkscape is still in beta, and this means it's somewhat rough right now - the index size, the values of mozRank and mozTrust, the depth of the crawl, and many more items will all be receiving upgrades over the weeks and months to come.
The SEOmoz Redesign
As you've probably noticed, the SEOmoz website has a new look and feel. We might be ironing out kinks for a few days, but I'm very happy with the new layout. We've moved to a wider width as our site stats indicate an extremely low percentage of users visiting on anything under a 1024x768 resolution. For our YOUmoz contributors, this means images can now be up to 630px in width and still fit into blog posts without breaking the formatting.
The re-design also includes a new toolbar for PRO members that provides quick access to all the PRO features when you're logged in:
Pages like our tools, guides (formerly articles), Blog, YOUmoz and home page have all received their own overhauls, and we'd love to get your feedback.
Changes to PRO Membership
As I noted a few weeks ago, the price for PRO membership is rising. Starting today, PRO membership will cost $79/month or $799/year. This increase is primarily to help us support the Linkscape project, which (as you can imagine) has been, and will continue to be, an extremely expensive endeavor. PRO is still "risk-free" to try, and if you're unhappy with the service, you can cancel anytime in the first 30 days at no charge. For our 3,000+ legacy members, PRO membership will remain at the price it was when you signed up for as long as you remain a member.
We're also offering two new levels of membership - PRO Plus and PRO Elite, which feature greater access to Linkscape, the Q+A service and SEO Analytics (and planned access to new tools and features in the future). You can learn more about all the different levels on the Go PRO page.
As I mentioned in my previous post, folks who've signed up at the old rates are locked in - no need to worry, your subscription pricing won't rise. However, the current pricing is "introductory" and we are planning to raise the rate for PRO to $99/month, $999/year in December, when we launch... (see below)
The Future
There's so many exciting things we're planning to do, but maybe none of them are more valuable to SEOs than this:
We're still in the planning stages, but expect to have a beta version of a toolbar that plugs into Linkscape's API (and leverages many other SEO data sources and tools) available before 2009. There's much more to come, including a sister project to Linkscape (probably launching in Q1 of 2009) and lots more data in Linkscape itself, as well as refining the metrics and growing the index. We expect our first major update around Halloween (Oct. 31), and according to my sources, it should make the currently awesome data 10X awesomer (and yes, awesomer is a word - and a good one at that).
Special Thanks
A debt of gratitude is owed, first and foremost, to the incredible team at SEOmoz. There are 16 fantastic men and women putting up with me (up from only 7 a year ago!) and they have all invested not only a tremendous amount of effort, but a dedication and passion that shines through in the new site and tool. Deserving of specific thanks are Nick Gerner and Ben Hendrickson, ex-Microsofties and founders of their own startups who were excited enough by this project to set aside their pursuits and join our team. Together, they architected the remarkable web indexing and Linkscape projects and have produced something that is, in my opinion, revolutionary – truly disruptive technology for an arena sorely in demand.
Jeff Pollard, our CTO, also deserves a special shout out. Over the past year he has really evolved into a great leader and invaluable asset to this company. He has put in long hours, not just towards Linkscape, but towards rebuilding the site, managing the dev team, answering site support questions, fixing tools, and providing solid input on various projects.
Also, huge thanks to all of our beta testers. We had tons of people volunteer their time to either physically come in and test the tool at our office or sign up as remote beta testers. You all provided us with fantastic feedback to make Linkscape better, stronger, faster. We couldn't have released our groundbreaking new tool in its current state without your help!
I'd also like to extend a big thank you to the families, friends, husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of the team here at SEOmoz. I know you haven't seen much of them over the past few months, and I hope that you're as proud of their accomplishments as I am. I can't promise things will slow down immediately, but we'll try to be a little less demanding of their time in the months to come.
Lastly, a debt of gratitude to Mystery Guest (whom I married just 3 weeks ago). Her constant support (she even edited this post at 1am) and unequivocal forgiveness of my every late night, nearly complete absence from the wedding planning process and substantial unavailability have been inspiring. I'm a very lucky guy.
BTW - For those hoping to give specific feedback about Linkscape, we've now got an official feedback thread on YOUmoz. You can also always email us - [email protected]. Scott will also be posting three videos on the blog later today that help to explain more about Linkscape (and to help make up for last week's lack of a Whiteboard Friday).
Not a huge surprise on the product, but a huge surprise on the naming.
I appear to be #4 and you are #5 for [linkscape], so I guess this is free advertising, but I do feel that I need to mention our Linkscape™ trademark.
Thumbs down? Really? Because the Mozzers forgot to check for other products of the same name (something many of us have done I'm sure)? That's hardly Richard's fault...
Thank you.
Although we looked into the trademark at the USPTO before we acquired it, without properly analysing your product and comparing it with Linkscape™ I am not in a position to say whether or not there is any issue here at all, but obviously I was a little surprised that seomoz chose a name which is already being used for an SEO product by Europe's largest full service onlin media agency :)
Looking at my profile, 60% of my thumbs down have come from these comments. Given that I had an anti-femenist rant a few months back it is quite scary how territorial things can get around here!
All I did was work for an agency who thought up a cool name for an SEO tool!
We did check it at the outset and during planning (we're not that careless) and saw nothing that would be an impediment. I'm sure Sarah will investigate the situation and address it properly as needed.
May I recommend a useful tool which I have been using for a while now. It allows you to enter search queries and returns results which are likely to relate to your search. There are a few of these tools around, but I tend to use this one.
I hope this isn't a spanner in the launch works!
It looks to be a superb product, I do not think a name should detract from it in any way.
It is what this product can do for you, not what it is called, which makes it worth your $79.
[EDIT: Although seomoz is at #3 and we have dropped to #4 already! The power of blogs in practice ;)]
Did the internet just break?
Where did Rishil's comments go from here?
My fault. Got some odd reply and asked for deletion, but it deleted the sub thread with my comment.
I was all set to gloat about it as well!
I'm incredibly proud to call myself an SEOmoz staff member today. A lot of time, effort and passion went into this and it's so good to see it finally launch.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta--errr, I mean mozzer.
I am peeing my pants in excitement. Thsts the best way I can explain how excited I am.
Cant wait to go through all of this data!!!!!!
btw that final panel on the comic should SO be a link to linkscape. Just saying.
Indeed it should, I was clicking on it like mad but nothing happened!
Same here.. I was trying click on the image and found it was not linked to Linkscape!
I used to have it that way but it created an infinite hallway when you viewed it in the lightbox on the actual Linkscape page. Clicking the link at the bottom opened Linkscape in the lightbox iframe. Then you could click the comic again and open an iframe inside of that. And so on and so forth until the end of time.
I didn't think Rand would link to the actually HTML file. Whoops!
Congrats to Rand and the other Mozzers on the launch! It sounds like it's been a lot of hard work, but the reward is that it's always a ton of fun to play with data from around the web.
Thanks Matt!
Does Matt's icon look nervous? I think it looks a little nervous.
I've been eagerly awaiting this announcement too. The beta test email that was sent out to everyone *still* didn't say anything about what the tool was. When I finally clicked through all the confidentiality stuff and saw what it was, I immediately fired off a "Holy crap this is freakin awesome" email to Rand.
I've been using it for several weeks now and it really has changed the landscape of my own SEO work and I think as people have a chance to vet it out, will shift the paradigm of search back towards SEOs and site owners.
I would like to file a complaint. You have completely ruined my Monday ToDo list. I'm not gonna get anything done today now that I have all this data to go though :-D
Congratulations - I've thought of similar, but its always been too big a project. Nice to see someone with the resources to take it on :)
What user agent are you identifying yourself with and do you obey robots instructions?
It looks fantastic! What an incredible project - I think it will change the landscape of SEO forever.
No thanks for the beta testers, though? :)
A thousand thanks to all of our wonderful Beta Testers, friends, and colleagues who've provided us with incredibly valuable feedback and support over the course of Linkscape's development!!!
Very sweet, Scott. It was a pleasure :)
Fantastic News. SeoMoz continues to be the best marketing investment i've made so far.
Can we quote you on that? :P
Congratulations on NOT BREAKING! Huge new tool release that I bet is getting the hampster sent into overdrive and the wheels haven't come off. Just a little thing to say that you've really put the time and effort into getting this launched, and launched well. Congrats again!
I find it quite funny really.
"Ignore the Google pagerank tool, it means nothing in the bigger picture of things" (general consensus in recent times)........ Now everyone will be checking their linkscape mozzyrank thing too often instead. haha
Very interesting but out of my price range realitically. Yes I know you can have smaller membership options but was kinda hoping that the top level would still be 50 bucks and I was excited to be able to buy in for less than 500 bucks a year or something. heyho never mind. I guess its for the existing members really because if we havent purchased already then we are unlikely to ever now cos we know we just getting the poo end of the stick haha. Cant I have full stats just for my own domain for free for letting you crawl it? :-)
I dont like the name again I admit, (trifecta i thought was strange chice too) simply due to my own moral perspective, I thinks its horrible when someone already uses that name as a business/company name. Isnt that something that your public relationjs people should look at?
I will still use this place tho, its great, maybe you should stick google ads everywhere so I can earn my keep?
Regarding the rank score, as it is similar to the all to familier pagerank, i am presuming that the sliding scale is extremely steep? i.e to get from a rank of 5.1 to a rank of 6.1 is going to be extremely difficult?
I say that cos im suprised my some of my little sites are only a point or so behind your own rank yet you have 80 times the reported links. (i.e about 400 compared to about 25,000.)
Some mega serious work gone into this and i congratulate you on that.
An achievement for sure.
Congratulations to everyone at the Mozplex and to the Mozzers in NYC on the release of Linkscape. I know this has been a long time coming and the journey is only beginning, so may you have the best of continuing luck ahead.
Also, thank you for the invitation beta test Linkscape. I agree with g1smd; now that the wraps are off and I can talk about Linkscape, I can only encourrage people to check this out, unless you are working for one of my clients' competitors.
-Tom
I just tried out the tool and holy crap it's great! It has a few small bugs and errors and I can see how to improve it but I can't believe how kick ass this information is. I found all kinds of links that no other tool has ever uncovered and and I just scratched the surface of all the options. This is truly remarkable. I'm very happy to have kept up my full SEOmoz Pro membership all this time without actually using the tools very much at all. This tool makes it all worth it. Great work Rand and the whole team!
The new design: rad. Linkscape: boss. And just so everyone knows I don't use 80's slang lightly. Time to deplete my Advanced Report Credits.
Wow. That's all I have to say. Did you use an opensource web crawler?
I was tempted to thumbs down the post... only because all the search marketers at my company are harassing me for access to Linkscape!!!
The advanced link intelligence report is good fun - picks up almost all of our C block network linking tactics :)
Now I just need people to leave.me.alone! Aaaargh!
(I expect some new PRO subscribers really soon)
ok, I'm sold.
For data-hungry geeks like me, Linkscape is going to be amazing.
It's like when you realise you've been woodworking for months with a toolbox that didn't include a saw or a plane.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, it does.
Freakin' Awesome.
Can't wait to play with this.
Hats off to everyone at SEOmoz. Top to bottom, excellent work.
Way to see the need and fill it. You have earned your place.
Thanks for your hard work. Now get back to work.
What are you going to do to top this? Another seven years are going to go by anyway. You don't want to be a bunch of has-beens.
Seriously Thanks
Hi guys,
First of all, thanks for the great tools and all the nice design changes on your website. I really enjoy the new SEOmoz look.
I just found couple of bugs in the new website i would like to let you know about.
The link under The Web Developer’s Cheat Sheet at the home page is generating a 404 erro page (the correct link URL should be https://www.seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pdf)
There are couple of the same tool descriptions "Crawl test" on the home page.
The link on IP2LOC tool page is leading to Linkscape tool which is a bit awkward.
I hope you all the best and i just want to improve your website by writing this. I really like what you do at SEOmoz and all the hard work you put into educating people about SEO. Keep it up :)
Good eye!
Further bugs you find can be sent to sitesupport[at]seomoz.org
. . . or just PM me.
Great going, you guys. Linkscape is a true game-changer in SEO (to properly use a popular cliche that seems to be floating around these days).
Nick, Jeff, & devs, your work has been well worth it.
Also, nice going on the new layout!
Awesome tool, it looks like it's going to be a huge help in evaluating link authority in competitor's backlinks.
One idea for an added featured would be a way to tag the backlinks. I'd love to be able to comment on each one saying the result of a link request or something. I suppose this could be done by exporting the csv but it would be awesome to have it built right in.
adding to feedback thread
Congrats to the SEOmoz team. I really like the new design and am pleased to see you have joined the 'Big Footer League'. :)
The new database and the new tools are truly phenomenal. Thanks for making this available.
Stunning, simply stunning - the Moz team have raised the game. Giving SEO's data that we could only dream of before. Oh and nice site redesign.
Brilliantly timed launch and what a product! Well done guys - i'm looking forward to using this tool very, very much.
Love the new design - it's still similar to the old one but obviously refreshed and updated.
Love the idea of Linkscape as well - any chance of getting a free trial for that tool only, perhaps while it's still in beta?
At any rate, congrats!
Basic Link Intelliegence and Comparison Reports are free to all (just go to the Linkscape page), but you'll need to become a PRO Member to run advanced Intelligence and Comparison Reports which provide much more robust and detailed info.
Awesome tool, congrats on the launch!!
The new design is super intuitive and flows much better for me based on my non-blind personal eye-tracking study.
Powerful new tool that. Rishi thinks "peeful" :-) <still laughing at that one>
I'm convinced to renew my annual membership!
lol couldnt help myself. Now where can I get adult diapers?
Just incase V2 is even better....
Wow! This is great!
Love the new design. Will take some getting used to, but I like it already!
Cant wait to check out all of this new stuff.
Congrats on the release and kudos on all of the hard work!!! I am sure it will pay off!
You forgot to make the Kevin Ryan forum moderator in the comic still drunk and hung over from the night before.
*Bows*
We're not worthy... we're not worthy...
I wonder what matt cutts and co think of the competition? :)
Oh and does robots.txt etc have any impact? should we be aware of the robot you use? (or is better to hide that?)
Rand,
Great
First, very glad to see this tool and excited to use it. My firm was just discussing the other day how beneficial it would be to have a source for web-graph data (links, domains, etc.) other than the search engines which have understandable conflicts in interest associated with sharing such data.
Not Sure...
I've been a Pro Member at the $49/monthly rate for quite a while. I originally joined b/c I had bought one or two "premium" reports and figured it was worth the cost. At the time, what I was buying was "the best" membership plan you had.
Now you guys have added two new membership plans above the Pro one. I understand that I get it for the "grandfathered" rate instead of the $79 or $99 that it will be. I appreciate that. However, I run an agency with way more than 5 clients. The Pro membership seems to have capped my reporting to only 5 clients. Thus, to continue to have access to a higher level of membership I'll need to upgrade... and while this tool is way-cool, there is a pretty big difference between $49 per month and $299 per month.
Question
Is there a discount for existing "grandfathered" members to one of the higher level packages? We effectively are getting a "discount" now on the basic package, though I doubt anyone was looking for a basic package when they signed up long ago. Perhaps a fee of $189 or $199 for the top-end $299 / month package for your existing 3,000 members?
I don't want to comment too much from the business side of things (being a software architect, not a business architect :) But I do want to point out that on the PRO landing page there's actually 3 levels, the second of which is available for $129/month or $1299/year, and the cap for linkscape reports starts at 15 per month, with the second level giving you 50 per month. And as a PRO member you get unlimited basic reports that have a ton of data on their own.
I hope that helps :) But I'll see if I can get Scott to add some comments when the west coast wakes up :)
Nick & Scott,
My concern is not with the 20 / 50 / 125 reports per month. I don't even know how many of those I'll use, but my guess is I'll have plenty.
Instead, my concern is with the number of domains. The "basic" PRO membership is only 4 domains. That's pretty small. I understand its geared towards the "solo SEO".
So what about those who signed up at the original membership level but are more than just a "solo SEO"? I have a relatively "small" 3-person SEO firm. We're not exactly huge players in terms of volume in the industry. We've got about 15-18 clients. Since your cutoffs are 4 / 10 / 25 for domains we'll need to get the "Big Business SEO" account. I sort find it hilarious that a 3-person shop is "big business".
I think part of that is b/c SEOmoz seemed to be doing relatively large-dollar client work before shifting to the subscription service model. Kudos. But there are many firms out there than have 1 to 3 people on staff and have way more than 4 or even 10 client sites.
Any thoughts on this guys? Any more practical way to scale up the number of domains and a bit lower price point?
To be perfectly honest though, I'll pay the $299. I can swing it. But I know about 15-20 other small SEO firms who that would be a prohibitive cost for. Perhaps they can make a cut somewhere else.
Understand that I'm not doubting its worth the cost here, rather just surprised that you offered a discount (free upgrade) to the basic, but not discount (have to pay full price, don't even get the $30 credit) for the mid-level and upper-level packages.
All of the PRO Subscription packages listed are intended to be single-user accounts. We do offer customizable PRO Enterprise Solutions for business that need multiple user accounts or expanded access.
Those interested in Enterprise solutions can email sales[at]seomoz[dot]org.
Existing PRO Members like yourself still have access to everything they had before as well as 20 credits/month to run Advanced Linkscape Reports. We haven't downgraded our basic (previously only) PRO Subscription, we've improved it and feel it now provides even greater value to our 3,000+ legacy subscribers.
We have added additional subscription tiers to facilitate the needs of marketers we've spoken to who desire significantly more access to Linkscape and other limited-use features of PRO.
Eventually stand-alone Linkscape Credit Packs will be available for purchase for those who wish to increase their Linkscape access without purchasing a higher-tier subscription, however the packaged subscriptions will still offer a better value for those who want and need to use Linkscape aggressively for their clients and campaigns.
Thanks, Scott. Wow, 20 credits a month. That is fantastic for smaller shops like mine.
I think we seriously considered calling it the "Mihm Level" of reporting. I'm not kidding. ;)
I had to Google [Mihm] to see what that meant.
Luckily, the first result explains that "Christopher Steven Mihm is seven foot tall and plays basketball..."
I know I've been away for a while too, but I'm trying to follow what is new now. I came on here to renew my Pro membership (yes, bad timing - should have done it last week).
But I'll be honest - I love the people on here and get good info on the site, but it was tough to justify the old cost since it was basically for some cool toys and not really a part of the work I do. I never really used much the Pro offered except running some occassional tools, but I knew it was there if I wanted it. Almost doubling the cost unfortunately is going to regrettably make me a former SEOmoz Pro level member. I'll still read the posts and be somewhat active on the blog, although I haven't had time to do that much either lately. But my two cents, I think you really may have priced yourselves out of the market for what is provided except for bigger companies where there isn't a requirement for cost/benefit, and those companies are getting fewer and far between. It seems like I'm the only one saying that on this post, so maybe I'm wrong. But I just think this isn't worth the coin anymore.
Ohhhhh... I Misunderstood!!!
I saw the basic membership includes 4 sites in SEO Analytics and 15 (or 20?) Linkscape report credits. I thought that meant we could only use 4 different sites in Linkscape. I was not familiar with the "SEO Analytics" tool so when I went to upgrade I was associating all those bullet points of features as being specific to Linkscape. I now see that the number of sites for SEO Analytics has nothing to do with Linkscape... it seems like Linkscape is just all about the report credits as your usage quotas.
...so...
MY BAD!
I was totally upset too - b/c under my (mis)understanding of what I was getting too was pretty poor. I interpreted it to mean that at the $79 per month level we could only get detailed reports for just 4 domains. That would have blown. We have way more than 4 clients, and hey I might want a little competitive intelligence there.
Too bad for you guys though that I now comprehend things - I was about to upgrade to the $299 plan just so I could run 1-2 reports a month for 10-15 clients. :)
was very excited to be able to start playing with this! looks amazing and the scope of your vision, well "thinking big" might be what you were going for...
jeez index the web... not too crazy huh!
How accurate do you think the data is (ie has everything been crawled?)
edit: silly links again...
That's a great question about accuracy! We feel great about where we're at. Even running on www.seomoz.org we get lots of surprises. So I think it's fair to say that we're plenty accurate to base in-house SEO decisions on (we have) and consulting decisions on (we have also).
If 30 billion urls isn't enough (and I understand you guys are pretty hungry! so are we), think of that as the 30 billion urls closest to the core of the web. We'll get out to the most obscure things soon (matter of days or weeks) And of course we want to be internationally complete too! But I think if you try things out you'll see just how exciting this is for yourself :)
Wow ... I'm blown away. You guys are pretty damn clever over there at the Mozplex.
Now it should be no problem to get my company to pay for a pro membership (ya ya, I know ... some people just pay for it themselves because it's worth it, trust me I would ... but the last thing I need is another bill ... eek!)
wow!
I knew the anouncement was going to be big, but I didn't expect it to be this big.
Very impressed, can't wait to get stuck into it
With you having this index and all, when can we expect Moz!, Moozle or AskRand?!
Just kidding of course, awesome new tool!
The big "Join now for 79.00 dollars per month" image link here on the main page returns a 404.
Also: with the $799, $79 per month subscription, can we cancel every month, or are we expected to complete the full $799 payment for the entire year?
All subscriptions are now annual. We provide a monthly billing option to allow more payment flexibility to our subscribers.
Are existing members being moved to annual subscription or can we stay on month-by-month?
Nope, legacy members will stay on whichever plan they were on before today for as long as they keep their account active.
Hey Rand,
Fantastic. I was thinking it was going to be a type of Search Engine. Awesome.
Also, can I make a business suggestion?
I see you have three tiers of Pro levels.
Some type of smaller level, for brand new people. Cause starting out 50month was alot (worth it...but alot). (Something like 1 site, 10 credits, 1 Q/A for 35month?)
Love the new tool. Great stuff man.
All is well but guys...I have lost the 4 Page Rank of my Profile Page. I have noticed that I am not the only one; even Will has lost his Page Rank.. :'(
Btw, I don't know why but I believe the old Information Architecture was part of the whole seomoz brand and also a differentiation factor... It was uncoventional yet every thing was so portable. It will take me some time to digest this change and I think I will miss the old seomoz too...
Sweet!!!
Awesome tool! Just what we needed!
BTW - bug on this post....Broken link when you click on the comic image!
Thanks SEOMOZ!!!
Is Linkscape an ad hoc development from SEOmoz or is there a relationship - or even a kind of agreement - between Linkscape and Majestic SEO?
On https://www.majesticseo.com/ I've got these figures :
Index stats: 32,690,802,864 crawled pages (211,051,271,656 unique urls in total) and
81,502,004 unique domains (685,461,105 with subdomains), ~ 1.5 trillion (1.5*10^12) linking relationships
Quite the same figures than the ones quoted above.
JML
congratulations, great tool, keep the hard work!! excited to start to get it into the flowchart
Yeah, I guess indexing the web's pretty good. I mean, not bad.
OK, OK, I'm joking - very, VERY impressive and I'm glad that I no longer have to keep my mouth shut (something I find very difficult to do).
Great work and I'd just like to say congrats to all of the Moz team - you've really raised the bar with this one.
Kudos to you and your team, Rand! You and the entire SEOMoz organization should be very proud. While the long-term impact of Linkscape and it's usefulness remains to be seen, this is a huge step in the right direction in bringing some transparency and better understanding of link values and their impact on a site's ranking in SERPs.
I look forward to the evolution of both the "Index of the Web" and your new "Linkscape Tool". I'd venture to say that "Linkscape" alone will help to increase subscriptions to SEOmoz Pro considerably... especially if it lives up to its potential. :)
I've been away for a while... and I come back to find a snazzy site redesign and a marvelous new uber-tool. I should go away more often.
Congrats to the SEOMOZ team and to everyone who loves this website, with the new features and especially new design :P
Rand -- this is brilliant. I'm so impressed with the scope of your vision.
I was just in the middle of running a Trifecta query, when my results opened up in the new design. Needless to say, I thought I broke SEOMoz :P
Congratulations on the launch, I guess my evening plans can wait while I browse through the new site.
great new design ! it looks fresh and very easy to go around!
good job to all the dev and graphic teams !
Run reports like mad now - before site owners start blocking the mozbot from crawling their sites.
Excellent work. I'm really looking forward to using this tool, and the many to come in the future. Thanks for all the help!
This tools looks and sounds amazing...
I doubt anyone is going to go all the way to the bottom to read this but wow :)
Congratulations to your whole team at SEOmoz. I thought this was going to be just another crappy SEO related tool but you've certainly gone way beyond anything I thought you were going to do. I can't wait to try this out so enough of my jabbering. Time to check it out!
Did you guys switch the site to use the browser default fonts? I've tried both IE and FireFox and the text of the site looks really bad. Not sure if it's a cache issue and I don't have the latest CSS file or what but it's nearly unreadable for me. And I tried setting the default font in FF3 but that doesn't seem to be sticking.
Try a hard refresh: the comments were unreadable for me yesterday, but a shift+refresh took care of it, as it appeared to be a CSS cache issue.
Still no luck. Even after hard shift+refresh its still the same.
One slight downside to the new design - on Chrome (which is now my default browser) the links in the left hand nav appear to me as white text which, on the light blue background, are pretty hard to see.
Bizarre...
did you try in IE? if its the same then its a hard refresh needed - robbothan had similar issue in FF and I think a refresh sorted it.
This is really big news, congrats guys! I think this is great news for the SEO community
Which left-hand navbar are you referring to?
I don't see any navigation on the left at all?
i had this problem this morning on mozilla, Will suggested ctrl f5 - but that didnt work, however rebooted my browser and seemed to work ok after that!
I forgot to paint right & left on my hands this morning - I meant right hand...
And it's fine on IE & FF..
No problem. I had wondered if Safari was having a "moment" and was completely hiding a menu from view...
I don't see the Events Calendar linked anywhere. It looks like that entire section of the site no longer exists.
Sadly, the Events Calendar is no more. It never caught on as we hoped it would and was time intensive to populate and update on our own.
Shame, because for all the listed events, it nearly always managed to get a first page slot in Google results for the event name.
I had seen an upturn in usage of the calendar in recent months, with several people now starting to regularly add events to the list.
Yup.......same goes for FF3 also
Brilliant idea! A search index, why didn't I think about that one? Nice design too :)
So exciting and it's about time we can access this great data set!
Absolutely brilliant. A new era for the SEO industry. Many thanks to the SEOmoz crew for such an incredible development. How's it feel to be the leader in the innovation department?
Very impressive. Love the new design. I thought I remembered hearing about a user forum in the new version. Is that upcoming?
This is great!
Is there a crawl prioritization that moves pro-member domains and domains that they are related to (or in competition with) ahead of the remaining 2/3 to 4/5 of the web that hasn’t been crawled?
Edit: I guess what I'm asking is more directly stated as follows:
Are you looking at and associating on-page content with particular subjects and categories and grouping data based on topical relevancy, or are you just looking at links and showing their anchor text?
Man that's a difficult question to ask via comments, hope it's clear enough.
I'm really excited about this project, can't wait to use it!
interesting, not sure how possible that is - but guess it might be possible to do something about urls submitted about which theres little data? Even if its just adding them to the list of url's to be crawled..
Good question, lemme move it to our feedback post, and I'll answer it there
Awesome work by everyone involved! Although I'm new around here, I'm sure it's safe to say that your hard work is much appreciated. I'm looking forward to using these shiny new tools! Thanks!
Awesome tool...this is indeed one of the most prolific SEO tools to date!
Thinking out loud here:
When are you going to launch a public search engine? It appears you have the capability...and in reviewing your posts (including the youmoz support thread) it appears that you're calling LinkScape an "inlink search engine". You also have "quality" based terms and metrics like mozRank...So, when can we expect to see mozSearch? :)
Kudos! Finally a real, comprehensive tool for our industry. Can't wait to start using it.
I have been excited about this for a long time. Glad it's in the public arena now and we can talk about it (you must feel that a few hundred times over!).
Looking forward to seeing it start being used and seeing what creative uses for it people come up with.
Congratulations to the team - and well done!
Ooooh. It is very different. I liked the old design. This new one looks good too.
Is it still powered by "Cake PHP" or is some of it based on Joomla code? (... or maybe Joomla borrows heavily from Cake hence why some things look familiar).
What is the UA of your crawler?
I have seen a bunch of various UAs appearing at various sites I work with, starting somewhere around August 20th - many of which have subsequently been banned as their intent was deemed shady or unknown:
Java/1.6.0_07
Java/1.6.0_05
Java/1.6.0_04
Java/1.5.0_10
Java/1.4.1_04
libwww-perl/5.79
Mozilla/4.0
SimpleHttpClient/1.0
Are any of these you?
my thoughts exactly...are you crawling as a shady bot now? when will that change?
I'm super-excited about this service! :)
But...
Webmaster enthusiasm about a tool like this (that one has to pay for to get significant value from) will be quickly tempered if details about crawler/robots.txt compliance is not disclosed.
And really, if all the webmasters who aren't paying for the report block the bot, what value will Linkscape have for the paying members? A bit of politeness up front should go a long way.
With that messy business out of the way...
Congratulations on your launch! :D
For those interested, the conversation regarding robots.txt and the Linkscape user agent has moved to the official feedback thread:
https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/official-linkscape-feedback-thread
Thank you! I can't wait to try Linkscape. And the new design looks great. I like the width. My only regret is that I hadn't finished my todo list and signed up for a Pro membership earlier. Guess I better do it now before it goes up even more.
Very excited about the new SEO Moz tool and look. Had mixed results while beta testing, but overall this is a very unique way to tackle many problems in the SEO industry related to collecting data. I hope to see more innovations in the near future including a more user friendly Linkscape results page that can synthesize the data.
What a fantastic accomplishment! The new look and tools are brilliant!
I'm most astonished at this stat...
"Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain..."
Wow. What valuable information. I can't wait to try out Linkscape!
Congratulations! All the hard work is paying off.
i wonder how many links this will get...
I've been on holiday which is why I'm late to the party but I just wanted to add my $0.02 of thanks, congratualtions and admiration to all the moz team.
(a bit late but being too bus) Huge congrats on the launch
Are we allowed to publicly review it now? :)
Fire away!
I would like to here more about the "Linkscape Report Credits"-system.
Another question: How international is the index? Seems good to me, but I would like to here your comment on that
I'll let Scott comment on the credits system, but basically you get a set amount of credits each month to use for advanced reports. Upgrading to a higher membership level gives you more. See our PRO landing page for more information.
As for the international aspect, we're crawling everything we can get our hands on (excluding REP protected pages of course!). We feel really good about where we are today, but we're probably not as good on the international side as we are on the US domestic side, but it sounds like you're already getting good results. The proof is in the pudding.
As Nick mentioned, there are now three tiers of PRO Subscription to address the needs of different SEO's. These tiers provide different levels of access to our limited-access features (Linkscape, Q&A, SEO Analytics) to meet the needs and budgets of different users, from solo SEOs to those running teams and campaigns at large corporations.
You can learn more about the new PRO Subscription tiers on our SEOmoz PRO Info page.
Thanks for answering this Scott!
There's still some confusion as to the new credit sytem. Is this renewed monthly, what Nick was alluding to, (example, start with 20 credits each month), or is that 20 credits for the lifetime of membership?
Thanks in advance!
Edit: *nvrmnd, answered below, THX!
Yep, they renew monthly just like Q&A credits.
Well done. Not too different - how did you manage to tame your designers? :-)
How does one delete a saved report?
Unfortunately, you cannot delete reports at the moment. We'll be working on adding this feature to Linkscape in the future, however. :)
Impressive!
being away travelling I actually missed this post and read the following one before, so just popping to say congratulations on this achievement. Indexing the WWW sounds big business
It's so cool!!, thank you very much!
Congratulations Rand...
Just had a little knowledge and hand over the tool till now, need to spend more time in order to learn more.
Great job...
it's so good!
Ahhh! Was this really released yesterday!? I still have so many thoughts from my beta testing to bug Danny with!! Where did the time go?!
Regardless, congrats guys. It's an awesome tool, and I can't wait to see it grow!
Edit: Someone ping EGOL on this in case he hasn't seen it yet!
Great news - really looking forward to having a play. I have 1 question I guess..
How often will you re-index the pages in your index, appreciating the fact that this relies on vast processing power...
I read somewhere (maybe in this post) that it will refresh about once a month.
Actually, thinking about this some more, this is ... interesting.
Wearing my 'generic webmaster' outfit - you're crawling my sites and then, what, offering to sell the data back to me?
Guys? Have you thought about the ethics of this?
Come on, you're scaring me! :)
These are good questions, I'm moving this (like all of the feedback) to the Linkscape feedback thread
Interesting point, but it's an Engines market. Example, if we block Googlebot, we get blocked from their results. However, if all the sites on the web started blocking bots, and then charging for access, just imagine the landscape then!
Looks awesome! You guys really rock! World like to play with linkscape first ;)
well done. this looks like an amazing tool
What is the BIN$ for the tool + data? Look forward to hearing from you. Mark
Great Work, Tool and Design. Now day by day SEOmoz Pro content is getting out of range.
How About Adding a facility to PRO Membership :- PRO Membership Amount + Facility to Add Q&A Questions or/plus Analytics Sites or/plus Linkscape Credits to your PRO membership as required.
Rand,Excellent explanation by you as usual. I also like the new site. Keep up the good work.
One another thing I can't add a comment using Safari. It won't let me drag the window to add the comment. I also see the message at the bottom about disabling javascript. I did that and I still couldn't add the comment. I am doing this using FF3 which I hate, get the Safari problem fixed please, thanks.
I use Safari (on Windows) and I have had no problems with the commenting system.
Additionally, our "draggable" comment system has never really worked in Safari, and as such we've recommended in the past that you disable javascript comments in your user profile to avoid issues.
Works fine for me in Safari - and it is installed on Vista.
Heck, I must go document that - something that actually works on Vista!
Wow wow we wa! Very impressive :o)
The site looks good. I like the guides section, as I used to always have to remember where to get to the Beginners Guide when I wanted to direct people there.
As a note on the Guides page, there are still text references to the old pricing of $49, and the links to 'Become a Premium Member' are broken.
Great tool! Is this the foundation of a future search engine that might take up the competition against Google as a search engine?
I've been a recurring pro member for quite a while now. Will I get the same prices out this periode or do I get to keep the prices at the same level forever?
As long as you maintain your account and billing information to remain current, you will maintain your membership at the original price you paid, forever.
This is really an amazing project but may i ask you why you have not implemented a search that looks also for co occuring links to related authoritative websites on a particular topic? If you have a linkgraph of the web you can easily find which are hubs for a certain query. Am i wrong?
wow you guys are already thinking about v2! I guess this one falls on me: in the past nine to twelve months we were only able to put together a comprehensive crawl of the web, large-scale data processing system for which there is no satisfactory off-the-shelf product, and some great internal and web tools to work with the data.
But you're right, there's even more cooking in our labs to come :) What you're suggesting is something we're already looking at internally, we're just not ready to stick that into our web front-end. Custom reports are, however, quite another matter...
jeezus! what an awesome thing to wake up to! You guys rawk! that's all that can be said. DAYUM! love the new design, can't wait to dig through all this awesomeness!
I love the design, especialy the shadow effects in the header of the page. It creates the impression that the main part is bent. Great!
Will there be a function for adding our own branding to report and translating? I would love to use some of these reports for clients..
The data is exportable as CSV to allow you to manipulate it into any kind of report you need.
One thing to consider is that showing our native reports to clients/bosses can be an effective way to communicate your position as it's impartial, third-party data.
A great post in the future then would be how to make good looking reports out of the CVS report :)
Good idea!
Way to go SEO Moz team! Looks really awesome.
Its changed....
Ready to start using new tool. Lets see how it goes... Thanks.
Nice Rand. Congratulations.
This might be a time that a super-hyped project was not over-hyped!
I for one was skeptical of what would be coming ouf of the hyperbole and am very pleasantly surprised.
Thanks for the work everyone.
Quite simply this is phenomenal.You have just blown my expectations for this new tool out of the water.
The design will take some getting used to, but it is clearly better. So much to soak in, and funnily enough the LinkScape/Index tool is a concept i have though "Wouldn't it be cool if.." promptly followed by "Nah I don't have the resources to do it on my own".
Well done Rand, you and the team deserve a pat on the back for the work you do in the SEO community.
Waaahh!! An Impressive transformation.
Both the new user-friendly design, and succulent
new tools available to PRO-members...
I like it, very much! :))
A perfect work Rand, congratulations to all the team!!!
That's a new one!
First off, Kudos to you Rand, and your team for doing such a great job
Second, noticed that this tool doesn't provide page level lists of backlinks - that all analysis is at the qualified domain or pay domain level
Am I missing something? Seems to me page-level linking analysis would be one of the coolest features of this new toy
It'll give you link intelligence for any URL (page) in our index as well as Domain Data for both the Pay-Level Domain (PLD) and Fully-Qualified Domain (FQD) that URL is on.
Thanks for trying to clarify, but I think you're speaking directly to my biggest question/criticism
The link intelligence for any given page is nice, but it would be nicer to get a list of links pointing to that very page. Is there any way to get that data?
That's exactly what an Advanced Link Intelligence Report gives you :) Advanced reports are available exclusively to SEOmoz PRO Members.
Looks cool gonna test !
The new site looks great! Yet to try out the tools. Congrats!!
Great User Friendly design. Have to check out the LinkMoz in detail though it sounds good!
Congratulations!
Fantastic redesign! I love your Linkscape tool already.
Looking forward for your SEOmoz toolbar that should be an awesome tool for SEO world.
I have a question about Linkscape report credits. We have 20 credits from the begining would they be restored each month or should be buy them?
Credits are allocated monthly for all PRO SUbscription tiers, so go ahead and use 'em, you'll get more next month :)
They are refilled on a certain date every month. For most users, unless you upgraded to PRO very recently (last month), it is your registration date for your SEOmoz account.
Anothe tool to use. Currently I found very convinient to work with Website Grader https://www.websitegrader.com/Default.aspx and Google Toolbar indeed.
Jack https://seoapplied.blogspot.com/