Hey gang - short blog post on a topic our product and marketing teams have been noodling around with. As many of you know, we've got our Linkscape index, which is crawled, processed and served out on a monthly basis (there's a new index about every 30 days). We also have a newer datasource, Blogscape, aka Freshscape (which is currently undergoing some repairs in Labs) which crawls a few million "fresh" RSS feeds and indexes full content.
The goal of Linkscape is to present a search-engine size link graph, while the goal with Freshscape is to provide a more realtime, full-content index of links and mentions similar to what Google Alerts does. The problem is... what to call them?
We're currently hard at work on a future iteration of the SEOmoz PRO platform that will include deeper integrations of both Linkscape and Freshscape data (so you can watch and competitively compare your wide link graph metrics as well as these fresher, primarily RSS-based links and brand mentions). As such, we need a way of segmenting these that makes sense to current and future users of PRO, and we'd love your input. The following polls have some of the names we like best right now for classifying Linkscape vs. Freshscape data:
If you have other suggestions or ideas, please feel free to include them in the comments. If there's one in particular that receives lots more thumbs up than anything in the poll, we might use your idea in the final version!
Thanks very much for the help - can't wait to show you our new stuff (though it will be more than a few months until this is ready to roll out).
+1 for letting the community decide the nomenclature of your data.
Agreed! TAGFEE for the win!
I'm lobbying for "Classic Links!" Who's with me? :]
That was my second choice. A close second. I ended up voting for Indexed Links since I thought that provided more of a clue as to what they were.
Well, technically... All the links are in an index of one sort or another, but the Linkscape ones are "processed." Of course, the product/marketing teams felt that might be too technical on my part :-)
i agree with the term processed... because after analysing links to your competitor you process the link in acquiring it ;-)
Classic Links FTW ;)
Hmmm... not sure about that one Mike.
I threw "Aged Links" into the mix - started out just trying to come up with something that would represent the alternative to "Fresh Links", which I really like.
"Aged Links" seemed to fit, then really started to grow on me - reminiscent of good wine or great whiskey ;)
Sha
On the second poll, "indexed links" seems to indicate that they are indexed by Google, could be a bit confusing to the uninformed.
Is the implementation going to look similar to Majestic's Historical vs. Fresh, where the two datasets are shown separately and combined & refreshed on a monthly basis?
Not quite. They'll be available through different interfaces and the trends will be reported separately in campaigns, too. We combine insomuch as URLs seen by Freshscape will go to Linkscape for crawling/processing, but there's multiple orders of magnitude between sizing of the two.
I also think "indexed" is a bad choice for the same reason... Linkscape bots finding the links is much different than Google indexing the backlinks. "Crawled" seems like a much better (more realistic) attribution.
Totally agree. "indexed links" would be confusing to most I would have to assume.
Voted! Best of luck Rand!
I went for "Fresh" and "Processed" although I confess I toyed momentarily with the metaphors of "Preserved" or "Mature" for Processed as in "Young" and "Mature".
*Nodding in agreement*
No matter what the fresh links end up being called in the software, I'm referring to them as Fresh Prince. Now, THAT's classic :)
Freshscape = Just in Time Links (JIT Links)
You had me at nomenclature... :)
Definitely "fresh links" - didn't like the other options. I'm going with @ipullrank and supporting "classic links"
When we are going to get result of this poll, I am waiting Rand.
You never run out of ideas! Love it and looking forward to Freshscape!
Thanks for asking our input! Excited to see which name you pick and to see the product itself.
Voted! "fresh links" was an easy choice for me. The other choice was more difficult.
I voted for "indexed" but I think "crawled" would be better, avoiding confusion with Goolge indexing. I voted for alert, it feels like a better description to me.
I am excited to test out the link alerts/fresh links. Google alerts are a joke to me. I seem to get an alert about 10% of the time that the actual mentions are happening.
Well, I put in Moz Blogometer and Moz Linkometer in the "other names".
Maybe some other interation might be appropriate, like BogMozometer, and LinkMozometer or whatever.
Goog Luck.
Maybe a little bit of offtopic here, Rand, but could you please make the results of OSE updating more often (Total Links/Root Domains)?
I voted for Recent Links and Established Links respectively.
Typically, we're trying to get new indices launched every 4 weeks or less. There should have been one on Feb. 14th, but a bunch of hard disks doing the processing at Amazon failed, forcing us to restart processing half a dozen times. We're aiming for a finished index by the 29th or sooner, but it's definitely a big frustration. We're considering other alternatives for the long term to have fewer of these outages (which additionally suck because we pay for the machine time even when a disk goes bad).
Thank you for such a fast and big reply. I love SEOmoz.
Thanks for the transparency. It is much appreciated. And so are the many recent upgrades.
OTOH, I have to raise my eyebrows. This is the senond time in recent months that an update has been delayed.
For those of us who find the PRO membership a financial stretch -- that's a problem. We risk disappointing clients.
May I respectfully suggest:
From someone that's new to SEO in general, there seems to be a lot of terminology to learn. Maybe simpler, more descriptive terms would be easier to understand?
This might seem like a silly question, but why not just "Links" for linkscape?
In the context of Linkscape/OSE, I think "links" is fine, but in a comparison of metrics types "links" and "fresh links" could get confusing so we're trying to give greater segmentation in the naming convention.
Ah, ok. I gotcha, thanks!
Mind if I throw a further outside perspective on it? (not trying to be a pain, I promise!)
It seems naming the freshscape content "____ links" is the issue, because if I am understanding, the Freshscape stuff is full content right (not just links)? (which is why I like "alerts" for that, the more I think about it).
Also, I think renaming the Linkscape "links" to something else, is what may cause confusion too. They've been called "links" all along. People will have to learn a new name for it, which may not be intuitive.
How about naming the NEW links something different enough, there won't be confusion between the two and you can keep "links" for Linkscape?
So if you have;
Freshscape = MozAlerts (or something)
Linkscape = Links
You avoid renaming "links" and call Freshscape something more true to what it is, and different enough from "links" to avoid mixing the two up.
If that sounds dumb though, I promise this is my last comment :-)
I'd agree ,
Is the freshscape data about links anyhow? It looks like we're talking about picking up URLs in known RSS feeds so is it realy an index of new posts? They may not have any links to them outside the feeds.
FreshPage
FreshPost
GreenAlert
EmergingNews
Great points - the issue is that in Freshscape, there are "links" as well as "mentions." So there's both "alerts" style stuff, and "link index" type stuff, hence the need for a naming convention.
It should be "Salary Links" ;) from your Linkscape/30-Day Index.