Season's Greetings, fellow Mozzers! As if this month hasn’t been exciting enough with the release of Custom Reports and Branded Keywords, today we have a special surprise for you. You asked for it, and we are happy to deliver. Introducing Historical Link Analysis for PRO!
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(Photo credit: Dana Pleasant Photography)
Being able to see your link metric data over time helps demonstrate the effectiveness of your link building strategies. And hey, who doesn’t like to see progress? Read on to see how this new feature works.
Subdomain Link Metrics
This update to the Links section is full of lots of little goodies. Not only are we now storing your campaign link metrics over time, but we have also added Subdomain Link Analysis metrics for you and your competitors.
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Historical Data Charts
What matters most in viewing historical metrics is how you are faring against your competition. For each metric, you can view historical data over time in comparison to your competitors. This way you can distinguish between the effects of your hard work to improve your link metrics and fluctuations that affect the entire index.
You can view historical data via the History tab or by using the menu link next to a given metric on the Summary tab. You can also export all historical data to a CSV file.
You may notice that we have made a few additional improvements to the Link Analysis section, including:
- adding Total External Links to Root Domain Metrics (to align with what is reported in Open Site Explorer)
- moving Link details to a separate tab for better readability
- updating the Summary PDF report to include Subdomain metrics
Linkscape Index Updates
Your link analysis metrics will continue to be updated every time a new index is released. With the rollout of this feature we'll now be able to store your data from previous indices as well, starting with data from the October 28th index. However, this data only goes back as far as you campaign does. When you create a new campaign, we'll only begin storing link metrics for you and your competitors from that point forward.
In order to give you the best data, we’re continually improving our Linkscape crawlers and the data they return to the Index. As indices change, it’s possible that your metrics may change as a result of what is included in one index vs. another. This may occur even if a site’s link profile hasn’t changed at all. I encourage you to check out Rand’s Linkscape Index blog posts (released with each new index) to better understand additional factors that could affect your metrics. Best practices indicate that you should always compare your progress against your competitors, versus solely comparing to your past performance.
Let Us Know What You Think
We hope these product updates bring a little cheer to your holiday season. As always, we would love your feedback! Feel free to share your thoughts, or holiday stories, via a comment on this post.
Happy holidays!
Boom! Link velocity and easier reporting FTW!
This is the reason I remain a SEOMOZ Pro Subscriber. SEOmoz adds so much value it's totally worth the monthly subscription.
Awesome feature guys - makes a Pro account much more valuable to me. Is there a limit on how far back the metrics will go (say 12 months for example), or is this likely to be permanent data?
Hi Kane,
We are planning to store at least 12 months, maybe more. What would you like to see?
Samantha, 12 months is good. Compete.com has a 2yr analysis which was awesome. I think 24 months would be great. In addition, no subsciber would want to lose all that data so retention would be higher.
Trailing 13 months would be great, to allow for EOY exports each year and give over a month of time to do the export. And, of course, 24+ months would be even better, especially if the dataset stored each month is relatively small and the cost of storage is negligible. Being able to go back 5 or 6 years on some sites in Google Analytics is killer - would love to eventually have that ability with OSE without my current 'export to google docs after each OSE index update" process.
Linkanstastic!
Always nice when a company listens to their clients. Thanks to the SEOMoz Team for this.
As one of the original requestors of this feature, I want to weep with joy! I'm so happy that you got this up.
It will reallt help validate where our efforts have paid off.
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
This is the kind of functionality we need and this might just be the argument my boss needs for getting us the Pro version of the tools.
Perfect Xmas gift!
This is exactly what I needed. Google Plussed you.
SEO campaigns and analysis are much simpler now. This is Awesome. Thanks.
Man, I really need to get pro.
You guys are really banging out useful tools.
So cool! Nice X'mas present from Moz :)
Thank you. Very useful.
Holiday tastic! Woop!
Gotta ge me some of that.. great way to start the new year!
I am speechless... this software continues to get better and better!
Is there a way to pull historical link data from the API yet?
Hi neopunisher,
No, we don't have historical data available via the API right now. It is on our long-term roadmap though! Stay tuned.
A client just asked me for historical link data on a competitor. Thanks!
what is the
Subdomain Link Metrics ??
Hi Kevin!
The Subdomain Link Metrics in PRO are metrics that apply to the subdomain of the URL you setup within a given campaign (this includes your competitors' URLs too!). For example, if I setup a subdomain campaign with the URL www.seomoz.org, the root domain metrics will be calculated for *.seomoz.org, and include data for all subdomains we find related to that root domain (for example, pro.seomoz.org and www.seomoz.org). The subdomain metrics will include data only for www.seomoz.org.
If you happen to setup your campaign for a root domain then subdomain metrics will be reflected for the subdomain in which your home page lives. Often this is www.[domain].com, but could also be [domain].com if a www subdomain is not set up as primary.
If you have a more specific question, feel free to reply or contact our help team ([email protected]).
this possibility is really useful!
thank you for the quality of your tools
Can we gain historical data from the API yet?
Could you send a note to [email protected] with that question? The author of this post has left Moz and isn't monitoring it, so that would be the best place to get a good answer.
it's better to have all links data in the same place...awesome!
Suggestion: In the future it could be better to track on the same screen: links and rankings to have a better view of improvements
You are fantastic!. Thanks.
Excellent news! Good to see our feedback is taken into full consideration, this sort of feature is definitely something Pro was lacking; to be able to easily see changes over time, for both yourself and competitors, is a huge step forward!
Awesome feature, but doesn't that data become a bit unreliable with the changes/improvements to linkscape over the months? Anyone who's been tracking their Linkscape numbers over the years know that the link counts fluctuate up and down for both them and their competitors depending on how deep the crawl is.
Hi Anthony!
Yes, you are correct in that there can be slight differences between the indicies as we continually improve our Linkscape crawlers and the data they return. However, in general you should see a positive trend over time if you're proactively link building from highly authoritative sites.
Even knowing about the differences (Rand shares those details with each index update in his Linkscape blog posts), many of our customers had been tracking their link analysis metrics manually. So we are happy to add this feature to meet the demand, and continue to recommend that you compare your progress against your competitors, versus soley comparing to your past performance.
Sweet! another great tool to help us be even better SEOs!
Hey, like the idea of historical link analysis but any chance this will work via OSE instead of via the Campaign?
Hi clickrmedia,
Glad you like it! Right now this feature is only available for campaigns, but it's definitely a topic for discussion on the long-term roadmap for OSE. Feel free to add your request to the Feature Request Forum. We rely on this feedback to shape our product roadmaps.
This was definitely overdue and looks fantastic - great job!
great post indeed MOZ..
Thanks guys! You are awesome.
Excellent!!! Santa came early this year.
Thank you SEOmoz Claus
Santa definitely came early this year! Thank you for all your hard work guys! I needed DA history for my marketing report and you delivered this feature on a perfect time! Big booyah!
Very good post. I like very much spying my competitors. Continue the good work guys!!
Sick! Awesome news Moz.
Wow, the hits just keep coming from you all. This is awesome!
That's great. I always appreciate efforts of SEOMOZ to make SEO campaigns and SEO analysis much simpler than other. I am happy to see the new features added in SEOMOZ.
That is....GREAT!
finally! Good work, mozzers! /like
Yeeeesss! Finally. Brilliant stuff. Many thanks!
Great news =) will be interesting to see how it stacks up aggainst the competition. But great too see SEOmoz takes all customer requets on board and delivers =)
Awesome, this is definetely great!
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thanks for shared. I think It's support for SEOer very well.
Fantastic news! I wonder what Majestic will come up with in response? :)
This post is really superb. Thanks for sharing.
Awesome, this is really nice post.
Wow, keep up the awesome!!!
Excellent, a great introduction to the long-awaited Historical Link feature, thanks Samantha. This will be so useful :-)
Yet another temptation to finally upgrade to PRO!
Also - the linkscape calendar says the index should be updated on Thursday, Dec. 22. Will this hold true?
Hi jrcooper!
Our next Linkscape Index is scheduled to be released on January 4th. It's possible that little elves were busy updating the schedule yesterday when you were taking a look, but everything should be up-to-date now.
Thanks for bringing up the calendar - it's a great resource to share with everyone!
Oops! I guess because the current date is highlighted, I made a mistake and thought that that was the next update. Thanks though, can't wait until then!
Thank you!!
A most required feature.
Hope you guys lead in 2012 rather than do "catching up" as far as tools are concerened.
HUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGSHUGS
Thank You :]