For the past 15 months, we've been working hard to improve Linkscape, our index of the WWW. Today, we're releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape's index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free:
The new tool, Open Site Explorer, makes gathering, sorting and exporting link data easier than ever. It's built with speed and accessibilty at the forefront and provides a tremendous amount of information about the links to any page or site. Since there's a lot to cover, let's dive right into some of the features and functionality.
#1 - Fast Access to Top Level Metrics
At the top of every results page, you'll find the key metrics we have on your page - the importance/ranking ability of that URL (Page Authority) and root domain (Domain Authority), the number of linking root domains and the total number of links.
#2 - See Up to 10,000 Links Alongside Anchor Text & Key Metrics
You can browse through up to 10,000 links (this is restricted to 1,000 for non-PRO members normally, but will be completely free to everyone for the first 48 hours). We also offer CSV export functionality, but it won't be available until the weekend (and then, only to PRO members - CSV takes up a LOT of bandwidth for 10K rows :-)).
#3 - Filtering for the Links You Want to See
As you drill down in the list of links, you can exclude nofollowed links or see only the 301s that point to a page. You also have the ability to sort by the location from which you want to see links - internal vs. external - and links that point to a given page, all pages on a subdomain or an entire root domain.
#4 - Display Root Domains that Contain Links
The second tab in Open Site Explorer (OSE for short) is the linking root domains. We realized that a lot of people want to get a quick glance of the types of sites that are sending links to a given page or domain, and thus created this unique view. In the future (probably a couple months away), you'll also be able to click an individual domain and see a list of pages from that site that link to the target of your choice.
#5 - Review Anchor Text Term & Phrase Distribution
Anchor text is often the missing link in a "why does that guy rank there?" puzzle. We're opening up the anchor text distribution so you can learn more about your own sites and pages and those of the competition. You can also sort by both the number of root domains that contain a link with a particular anchor text term (single word) or phrase and the raw number of links containing that anchor text.
#6 - Pie Chart Displays of Link Data
Many SEOs worry that, particularly on small sites, they may be seeing lots of numbers of links, but the sources aren't ideal. In this view, we try to illustrate through pie charts the percentage of links that come from internal vs. external pages and are followed vs. nofollowed. This view is at the top of the "full metrics" tab.
#7 - Rejoice in Data Junkie Heaven
Additionally in the "full metrics" tab, you'll find a list of all the Linkscape data we've got including mozRank (an algorithm similar to Google's PageRank), mozTrust (akin to TrustRank) and many more. You can also see the more refined link counts and data for an individual URL, the subdomain it's on and the hosting root domain.
#8 - Compare Pages/Sites Link Metrics to One Another
A frequently requested feature is the ability to compare one site/page against another. OSE makes this quick and easy with a comparison view drop-down. If you click the "-" symbol again, you can return to the individual report view.
#9 - Graphical Views of Metric Comparisons
In the comparison view, we show nice visual charts that you can embed in a client report or send to your boss to help illustrate just how challenging it might be to take on a particular competitor. For example, you can see above that Fred Wilson has a long way to go to reach Guy Kawasaki's stats on his blog (granted, Guy's posts are designed for a much broader audience and he's been blogging for longer).
#10 - Compare Links Side by Side
At the bottom of this comparative view you'll see links side-by-side. We noticed a lot of SEOs open two browser windows with lists of links to compare them against one another and thought "why not make that easier?!" With this feature, you can scroll through the links for two pages to get a fast sense for the quality and variety of sources that point to each.
New Metrics - Domain Authority & Page Authority
We've got much more information coming soon about these two metrics, but basically, we're using our ranking models to build predictions about how well an individual page might perform in the search engines (Page Authority) or how well content on a root domain would do (Domain Authority). These aren't like PageRank or mozRank at all - they're much broader.
Authority scores take into account all the metrics we have about a page and hundreds of derivatives of those metrics. We've put the scores on a classic 0-100 scale that's logarithmic (so moving from a 50 to a 60 is much harder than moving from a 10 to a 20). Over time, these metrics will change and evolve as we get better and better with our machine learning systems (and as the engines and the web itself changes). Watch for this week's Whiteboard Friday with much more detail on this subject. For now Open Site Explorer is the only place to get Domain/Page Authority data, but we'll be rolling it into the SEOmoz toolbar and other tools over the next few months.
Linkscape's Index Update
Linkscape itself has also updated - growing to a whopping 65 billion URLs with 45 day minimum freshness. As Nick's previous post on the Trillion+ URLs Linkscape has seen shows, freshness is one of the most critical metrics for those who care about accurate link data, and we're working hard to keep our index as up-to-date as possible. Linkscape recrawls every page in the index each month, so no "old data" is stored or served. Our current metrics for this index are:
-
Pages: 64,180,990,434 (65 billion)
- 301s: 293 million
- 302s: 672 million (Marshall Simmonds calls this "job security")
- 404s: 360 million (but we do try to exclude known 404s in crawls, so this may be low percentage wise)
- Subdomains: 259,977,972 (260 million)
-
Root Domains: 63,264,651 (63 million)
- .com - 49.4%
- .net - 6.4%
- .de - 5.8%
- .org - 5.2%
- .ru - 2.5%
- .cn - 2.5%
-
Links: 701,881,850,733 (701 billion)
- Nofollows: 13 billion (1.85%)
- Internal Nofollows: 9.06 billion vs. External Nofollows: 4.11 billion
- Meta Refreshes: 40.9 million
- Internal Links: 638 billion vs. External Links: 63 billion (people link to their own stuff a lot more than they do to others)
- Feed Autodiscovery (i.e. RSS/Atom feeds): 2.261 billion
- Rel=canonical: 100 million
- Links passed through 301s: 8.61 billion (just over 1% of all links go through a 301)
-
mozRank Correlations to Google Toolbar PageRank
- Individual page mR: 0.42 (avg. error +/- 0.56 from PR)
- Subdomain mR: 0.45 (avg. error +/- 0.35 from PR)
- Root domain mR: 0.45 (avg error +/- 0.37 from PR
-
File Extensions
-
html: 26.5%
-
php: 21.7%
-
htm: 10.6%
-
asp: 5.7%
-
aspx: 2.9%
-
cgi: 0.89%
-
API Update
Finally, we've also updated the SEOmoz API - you can now get lists of links for any URL for FREE along with tons of other link data and metrics. Sarah & Nick have a blog post coming soon with more, but for now, check out the API page to get a developer key and the API Wiki for more details.
Answers to Common Questions About OSE
What's the difference between OSE and Linkscape?
Open Site Explorer provides a fast, free, more basic view of link data while Linkscape provides power users the ability to refine by dozens of filters, search within link anchor text, URLs and domains. Linkscape will let you dig into significantly more metrics and details on a per link basis on things like mozRank passed, Domain mozTrust, juice per anchor text, links from particular TLDs, etc.
OSE is substantively faster than Linkscape, and not as metrics heavy. It's designed to give the "500 foot view" vs. the deep, in-the-weeds look you can get in Linkscape. Certainly feel free to try both and use the one that suits you best.
Why is OSE on a separate domain?
Three big reasons, actually:
- We've haven't tried the microsite strategy in a long time (since the first launch of the Web 2.0 Awards), and want to test and see lots of SEO and strategic/branding (we'll have some cool data to report in the next few weeks/months)
- OSE is built entirely on the SEOmoz API platform - we wanted to show off just how much you can build using that service :-)
- SEOmoz engineers are very busy working on another exciting launch (scheduled for June) so we wanted to split resources without putting a load on folks focused on our site (PRO members may see some previews of that even earlier)
What will OSE continue to offer for free?
For the first 48 hours, registered members (anyone with a free SEOmoz account) will get the full PRO features (unlimited metrics, up to 10K links per report, full anchor text data, etc). After that, anyone can still get up to 1,000 links per search and a sampling of metrics. You can see a full breakdown in the bottom right-hand corner of the homepage.
Why Call it "Open" Site Explorer?
We're aiming to give out more link data than anyone else on the web for free. Open Site Explorer not only gives out lots and lots of links (up to 1,000), but also metrics and link numbers for free (permanently). We also provide a free API that lets you use any of the data (including lists of links) in your applications, public or private. Our goal is to be transparent with this data - to show exactly how many pages/domains are in our index, show accuracy with freshness and canonicalize and re-crawl like a search engine. We're trying to take the web's link graph and make it as available as possible and use the revenue component of PRO membership to accelerate growth on index freshness, quality and size.
Please Give Us Feedback!
We'd love to hear from you. If you have suggestions, bug reports (this is a first launch, after all) or ideas for future iterations, please leave them in the comments or send them via the Open Site Explorer feedback form. We're of course very excited for the launch of OSE and would certainly appreciate you sharing and helping us spread it around. The free period ends at 8am Pacific on Friday, January 22nd, but PRO members will continue to be able to access all the features and unlimited reports (and free reports will still provide up to 1,000 links).
p.s. Two great posts with more information on this topic appeared in the last 24 hours and are worth sharing:
- Open Site Explorer Bookmarklets from MediaWorks UK
- Six Highly Actionable Tips for Open Site Explorer from SEOGadget
If you have more to share, feel free to link in the comments.
Great tool, very handy to have the ability to see total links coming into a site including those pointing to 301'd domains.
For anyone interested I have created a simple bookmarklet for you to use Open Site Explorer with one click from within your browser.
Find it here: https://www.mediaworks.co.uk/blog/open-site-explorer-bookmarklet
Checked them out, saved them and tried them.
Thanks for the these very useful add-ons for Firefox. Simple but very useful for speeding job.
Thanks MediaworksUK. I didn't know how to make a bookmarklet so not only did you give me something useful, you've taught me something useful.
That is perfect, I've stuck it on the ol' bookmarks bar at work and had a play around with it, it seems to work great! :D
Is there going to be some way to exclude sites?
One of the problems with this kind of tool is that often (well for me anyway) you are dealing with competitors who have multiple huge sites, 100K+ pages each with sitewideinterlinking.
Maybe one competitor would have 10, maybe even 20 forums around a particular vertical.
On Yahoo, when I exclude those domains, and maybe a few additional known blogroll links I often whittle what appears to be 200K+ external links down to less than 1000.
In the list of links we only show up to 25 links from any given root domain (e.g. *.seomoz.org). In the link counts we only cut this two ways:
* total links
* external followable links
If you want finer grained control over things you should check out the API. Or keep asking good questions like this so we know lots of users want this feature :)
From what I can see in the API (I am a tinkerer with APIs, not a programmer) there isn't a way to filter the data being pulled in the same way as Yahoo, you would have to do that afterwards.
To do any reasonable filtering I would have to pull the whole dataset.
Also I get the branding connection
Yahoo Site Explorer - Open Site Explorer
Yahoo returns 1000 results as well and Rand was talking about how site explorer might disappear soon.
It seems you need to provide more conventional filters/parameters to any given query - the bit flag approach isn't going to work for more complex queries.
There would of course be a small conflict between enhanced queries and pricing based upon the amount of returned data.
Check out the latest page on the link API. We do have a filter option that includes things like internal, external, 301, nofollow, etc. I hope that's pretty much what you're after. But if not, PM me, or contact us and we can discuss more.
Darned little to add that everyone else hasn't already said.
This is a brilliant piece of work. Lightning fast compared to Linkscape and uber excellent layout and visuals.
Nick and gang, 3 cheers for y'all. It's an excellent tool!
Hey Rand.
Great tool. I was checking it out yesterday. Only have one problem; no https metrics.
A problem we are having is that two of our main competitors 301 their site to https; however, linkscape and open explorer dont allow us to drill into their backlinks via https- only http.
Can I wishfully hope that this function will be added in the near/close/sometime soon future? lol. If not, any recommendations, other than yahoo site explorer, to get some of this competitor info?
That's good feedback. Currently we avoid https pages. Although we see https more and more in SERPs, so eventually that's going to be very important for us.
Hey rand and co.
What's the current status on tracking and providing backlink info for https URLs? Is that in the works?
Supporting https is definitely in the plans, but it's a big project (following some other big projects) for the Linkscape team. Our current plan is to address this in during the last quarter of this year. I apologize for the wait.
Very nicely designed tool. I might need to go pro now :S
Some improvements I'd like to see:
Aside for some minor issues, I'm loving it.Â
Still gettin' a kick out of your logo Springboard SEO
Rand,
I can't tell you how happy I am to enter extremely competetive markets having SEOmoz' tools and now Open Site Explorer at hand. This is the OMG tool of the year for me.
Oh la la... Open Site Explorer is really a great tool worth any cents.
Personally I will use it (with other great tools here, especially 'Linkscape Visualization and Comparison') for my pre-contractual sheet... because these datas are worderful for gaining "relevance" with the (potential) clients.
Then I will use Linkscape once the contract is signed.
Finally: I so love the name and how you were smartily giving to it exactly that name.... (Open) Site Explorer. That's real marketing.
I love it. Can we call it 'Search engine for Marketing folks' :-)
I am still waiting for 1 feature from somebody though -
Getting a list of linking domains with number of links from them.
It will ease the pain of identifying major partnerships/trends.
Great idea Rajat!
This is a fantasic new tool.
In particular, as I have written in a post about the new Open Site Explorer, sharing this information with webmasters (who don't necessarily have the technical ability or the budget to use other tools) makes this aspect of SEO much easier to grasp.
SEOmoz should be highly commended for their commitment to turning SEO into a process that every webmaster can understand and benefit from.
Great write up, Rob.
There are 5 actionable tips for this tool on SEOgadget
It's a great tool - with the only feedback from me being that metric changes over time would be extremely valuable!
Thanks for the bump on that feature. We're prioritizing stuff, and I can say that historical analysis is right up there.
Great to hear, Nick. PS I love your canonicalization tool too!
open source, using the free API. It's all yours.
Does not recognizes Cyrillic (Russian) letters. Can you fix it?
If you can give me an example (reply in comment, PM me, twitter, etc.), I'll investigate the issue.
Message Sent
Thanks for the report. You found a neat bug :) We should see results of the fix in a matter of weeks.
I already knew this would become my most-used tool at SEOMoz, but when a certain someone called it "pretty slick" I knew you guys hit a homerun.
It is looking that way. Not only the functionality but the interface!!! It's really good looking. Not too trendy (ie Envato etc) but it just looks great.
Looking forward to seeing what people say about it on the different blogs around the web.
These are the kinds of things that get us Search Marketers' undergarments wet, please pardon the metaphor. =)
(edit from Rand: I made this comment more gender neutral :-))
appreciate that! :)
Some argue that there are better link data tools out there, but one area where you guys are miles ahead is with data visualization. The new tool looks awesome, easy to use, and simple to understand.
nah, we're the best. j/k :)
One of the things we work on really hard is trying to make sure the data is easy to use in addition to having a raw data (csv export or API).
I'm pretty psych'd about what's next for contextualizing the data. As Rand pointed out most of the team around here has been hard at work on a completely different project.
Bottom line, this is 100 times better than Yahoo Site Explorer. The phrases and term separation is a nice feature compared to other SEO tool sets.Â
The comparison site analysis is really thought out interface. Good job guys!
Well done, but this doesnt make you cooler than me.
Luckily Russ, I just checked through the OSE list of goals and "make us cooler than Mr. Jones" isn't on there :-)
Damn..... This is a very very awesome tool...
(edit from Rand: removed inappropriate content)
Randy, I think this new update will take you guys to next level compared to MJ, I been using them for a long time now since actually they were in testing phases. I for one think that your index has relevant RUNNING site whereas for MJ they have pretty much an old index. I heard they have updated but not sure how it has changed their overall performance but with your new updates I think I will probably say bye to my MJ account.
Wow - an awesome tool!And the data for Swiss web sites are quite good!
 Thanks for the access!
This is really a great tool for SEO and Webmasters, just been playing around with it today and it definitely provides a lot of useful information.
Well done to SEOmoz. This means that if and when Yahoo Site Explorer goes out we already have something to work with. Although I'm pretty sure I've already ditched Yahoo for this!
You guys are really doing a good job of baiting people over to SEOmoz Pro!
Well done once again!
Looks very appealing indeed, I think this is going to be one of the one stop shop replacements for Yahoo Site Explorer for free users when it's finally decommissioned... I am sure you have had that market opportunity in your sites for a while ;)Â
I love how easy it is to get key comparisons without going into too much detail, we all know that too much information can cause misdirection and burden our working process.
A beautifully crafted tool guys, look forward to putting it through its paces shortly.
 Props to SEOmoz!!
Thanks so much for this team. I'm really excited about the potential for this software. Even more exciting for me is the opportunity to use the new Linkscape API to develop some interesting software and browser addons.
Anyone interested in partnering with me on such an endeavor?
If you haven't checked them out the wiki and the group are great places to check out.
And if you do develop something neat, post it to the group. If you've got any code to share we might even be able to include it on the wiki's code samples page.
i'm curious (and possibly just confused - need more coffee!) about the Graphical Views of Metric Comparisons screenshot in this post and in Distilled's post. both show the "Page Authority" and "Domain Authority" as being quite close but the "Total Links", "External Followed Links" and "Linking Root Domains" to be way off.
How is the Page Authority and Domain Authority figured to be so close when the link numbers are so far off?
Not at all kimber - I think the intuition there is hard to grasp at first, but I'll do my best.
DA and PA use a mashup of all metrics and derivatives on those metrics (much more than just numbers of links). Thus, if you have a few links, but they're powerful and important, you may have DA/PA scores similar to a site/page with far more links that are less important.
It's also true that DA/PA are on a log-scale, so a 65 isn't actually very close to a 75. In fact, it may be much, much harder to go from 65 to 75 than from 30 to 65 (for example). We're gonig to provide a lot more detail about this in an upcoming post that Ben & I are working on.
cool. got it. thanks for the explanation, rand! plus the caffeine is in full effect now so all is well.
Where can i find the 'average page strength' of a keyword?
It the best tool
Very nice tool, used it over the last 2 days. I like the fact you can compare 2 websites side by side. I would like to see mR added as a key metric in the future though
We've got mozRank on the metrics detail page. We don't have it on the comparison view because we think that Page Authority and Domain Authority are much better metrics for this purpose.
After watching the whiteboard friday i understand why mR has been removed =)
very very good system
Thanks for this very cool tool!!
Thank you SantaMoz for this late Christmas present. What a lovely gift.
Hey Guys,
 This looks pretty impressive & I'll have more to say once I've had a good play!
Maybe it'll push me over the edge & I'll have to go PRO!!
:-)
Thanks
Conrad
The tool is showing that one of our websites - www.ixpo.com - only has links coming in from 2 external domains, whilst Y! Site Explorer shows it as having links from 48 external domians. I understand that Y! Site Explorer is far from accurate, however I know for certain that the Open Site Explorer tool should be showing links from more external sources than it is? Whats happening here - can anybody help me out or explain the problem?
OES is powered by Linkscape, which can be wrong sometimes: Linkscape FAQ.
My guess is that we'll likely have more link data on Ixpo.com (and closer to what Yahoo! reports) in our next index update. We're still at around 60-70% of Yahoo!/Google index size and have some biases towards crawling pages close to the top of sites. Depth and freshness are both foci for the next few indices, though.
That's great - looking forward to seeing those changes. Just out of interest, what sort of size are we looking at? Is it as sizeable as Linkscape at the moment or is it smaller?
Obviously it will expand, I've told the boss at work and he's loving it. Passed it on to a few other SEOs too.
Really good reception everywhere so congratulations Mr Fishkin.
Both OSE, Linkscape, several labs tools and the API are all powered by the same index. We've seen about half a trillion distinct URLs in the last year, and have about sixty billion of them in the live data set.
In case anyone is interested, our live index has grown from about 50TB to perhaps 200TB in the last six months. Every five weeks or so we update all that data. It's pretty hot... if you're in to that sort of thing :)
Congratulations seomoz team. Great tool, I´m seeing some good results here in Colombia, South América. It takes quite a while though, I get a message that a script is not working on the site. Keep up the great work.
Thanks for the comment! If you could send the specific error message and any additional information to our feedback form we'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
Great post Rand. Is this still up-to-date information?
Great tool! Now people will start asking Q&As "How to make open site explorer crawl my website more often" :) Once again congratulations to the team for the great work!
I've compared this tool to Yahoo! Site Explorer and there is a significant difference between the total amount of linking pages. I did this with multiple sites and Yahoo! always calculates a greater number of backlinks. I'm still green in the SEO field and would love some feedback regarding the matter. Thanks!
Great question - Yahoo!'s index is substantively larger than the one Open Site Explorer relies on (Linkscape), hence you'll generally see higher numbers of links. However, the correlation between numbers tends to be very strong, so if you see a site with 2X the link numbers in OSE, you'll also find that Yahoo! tends to report ~2X that number through Y!SE.
We're certainly working to make the index both bigger and fresher, but our goal is to provide the most important links and the ones people care about more so than high number counts.
Hope that helps!
This is a fantastic tool and a productivity increaser!
The side-by-side had to be a "headsmacking" requirement for building this. I can't tell you how many times I'll have multi-screens open comparing link info. Genius!
Hey hey hey Nick et al. You are starting to make waves with your excellent new tool.
Today's Daily SEO tip https://dailyseotip.com/hide-your-backlinks-with-mini-sites/574/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DailySeoTip+%28Daily+SEO+Tip%29
was all about how to hide your backlinks because of the new Open Site Explorer tool that now makes it so easy to find do follow links.
Way to shake up the industry gang!!
"And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free"
Forgive me if I missed it, but is this tool going to be included with the Pro membership or will it be in addition.
 Again, sorry if this was covered and I missed it.
 David
Yeah, it outlines that there are x amount of links allowed to free users, to members and then pro members. Each different level gets a different amount of links, analyses etc.
This is part of your PRO membership. Free members can see up to 1,000 links per report and a few metrics. PRO members get up to 10,000 links in each report and the full rundown of anchor text data and metrics (which you can then download and sort in the CSV).
Export to .pdf of the charts would not hurt.
What a pity! The time is up! Hope that I could have another chance to try this, free! :D
You can still get access to plenty of the functionality as a registered SEOmoz member. Just visit and check out all the links
have had a play around with this tool, it's intuitive and has useful, actionable data, so great work!
One good addition would be to filter out 302 links if possible, so that we could find links or legacy/mirror domains of clients that are redirecting incorrectly.
Loving the OSE, Loving the SEOmoz
exactly what seo world needed .. Zuper Zuper Nice
Thanks Rand for this wonderful opportunity to get a peek at how you guys dominate the web SERPs.
I can see my Page authority around 80 ...... but domain authority around 60. :(
So the metricks says - u must try to get votes from as many domains ( surely related to the industry) --Â as possible - and then only you could dominate SERPs.
Of late, I have noticed this feature while researching G SERPs and your tool just made me 99.99999999999999 .....% confirmed.
Cheers
Yes please.
This is one future member right here :)
I've had the chance to use the open site explorer for a while now, and it's definitely very useful. :)
we're glad you like it! If you have feebdack, suggestions, hit a bug, or just want to say hi, check out the feedback link!
It is certainly a very useful tool, particularily the ability to make up graphical representations of the data (I love a good graph, me) and also the comparison feature.
However, given the (compartively) limited range of link data (from Rands own admission it's more like half that of Yahoo/Google) it certainly isn't enough to make me want to purchase it as a product. At the moment. My opinion may very well change but I prefer to let others be the "early adopters" and find all the bugs while I step in when a product is more polished! This could well become the industry standard in say 6-12 months time if improvements are made, which I am sure they will be.
In terms of marketing, the name and the timing given the expected demise of Y!SE is second to none, so I commend your business acumen.
Edit: One concern I have is that a lot of people might not know what a logarithmic scaleis though and so miight misinterpret the scores you apply. Saying "oh well it's harder to get from 50 to 60 than from 10 to 20" saddens my inner geek. Minor quibble though.
Completely agree with you. The metrics at the moment are limited but I still think they're valuable and, as a free tool, very useful.
As I said in a previous comment, it's going to be something that will develop into something amazing.
Thanks for the new tool.
Since this is on a seperate domain, you also get to control the anchor text on Open Site back to seomoz. Maybe you should change the anchor text at the top from SEOmoz Tools to just SEO Tools - 14,800 exact search query volume and seomoz ranks 5th. ;)
This is one fantastic post by Rand. It's even PRINT worthy, since I'll probably want to review often.
This should even be part or one of the Introductory Guides in the SEOmoz Learning or Guides section.
Rand has done a particularly good job and making clear and easy to read. Oh, and thanks for including some pie charts for displaying data, since I understand and absorb data more readily with charts.
One request, could you possibly post a refreshed version of this post, with any new updates that have been made over the months. That would be greatÂ
Are predefined or user specific filters planned? I always want to see "Followed" links from "External" to "Root" and I would want to see sitewide links as 1 link and not to see them repeat 200 times on a 250 link report. Can I save this filter as and press a 16x16 icon to see it set automatically or even by default when I open OSE?
I'll pass that on to the right people, but I don't think custom filter presets are on the road map at the moment.
Excellent work the SEOMOZ team, what a great tool, haven’t had enough time to sit down and go through it properly yet, but from what I have seen so far it looks a really useful tool. Must say probably my favourite part so far is the comparison tool, also agree be nice to be able to export this data.
Thumbs up for this one, looking forward to getting stuck into using the tool.
Love this tool. I have to play around with it more, but right off the bat I like that it reminded me not to slouch on commenting on articles and blogs out there.
Nice, I can't wait to also use this on competitor's url to see how they are doing and compare my sites to theirs. A very valuable tool.
Really rocks! Thanks SEOMoz! :-)
Wow, this rocks! I particularly like being able to filter by followed vs nofollowed and internal vs external. The anchor text analysis is awesome too.
This is by far the best backlink analysis tool I've ever seen.
One additional feature that would be helpful would be the ability to sort the competitive comparison list by the same criteria: followed/nofollowed and internal/external. It would be nice to be able to sort domains by followed/nofollowed as well.
Other than that, it's hard to think of how it could be cooler than it alerady is. Awesome job, guys!
It looks there is some issue with parser. Please do following steps :
<!-- comment tag<table><tr><td><a href="site.com">some linke</a></td></tr></table>-->
Ideally above link should be neglected as it is in comment. However, linkscape is giving it as a link. Please check pareser code.
We should be doing that in at least some cases. Can you PM me an example page?
Great job guys! The index update was also really good news!
Quickt tip: put a <link rel="image_src" href="seomozlogo.jpg" /> in the header of the site so it shows in facebook when posting the URL :)
 Cheers!
Thanks for having released such a powerful tool!
Brilliant tool. The speed is impressive!
Thanks for noticing! We spent the last week doing tons of perf testing and speed was a firm requirement from the start.
This is fantastic, we all love more toy!
I believe Rand "leaked" a screenshot of this a few days ago in a SMN Web Cast. Since then I have been waiting to give it a try.
Thanks SEOmoz for another cool tool!
Very nice tool. According to OSE, our site beats all of our competition, in some cases with a large heavy club. Now if you could just pass that along to Google so they will quit ranking us so low ;) A gal can dream!
This is a very very nice tool from what i've briefly seen today. Many congratulations and thank yous to the team!
The ease of use, auto weighting, ability to filter nofollows, anchor texts etc and immediate visualisations available with this is just excellent. A far more accesible way into linkscape data! Also very impressed this is all built off the API.
Which leads me to the question - for me a truly 'open source' site explorer would combine linkscape, majestic and YSE data (while its still around) and mash them together.  Am I just dreaming? =) More to the point, am I just being data greedy and would this actually be useful?
That would be awesome. I think all of these services have APIs, and at least some are free.
Great stuff. Very easy to use and fast!
Question: for the anchor text distribution report, does this included nofollow links? Would be great to have filters to see all, those that are nofollowed, those that are followed and 301s. Also - does this include image alt text or not? Would be great to be able to filter with that also.
we have anchor text data for nofollowed links, but the counts only include followed, external links.
In the (free) API we've got internal follow counts and mozRank passed (internal and external) as well.
Thanks for the clarification Nick. Might be worth adding a little comment on the page saying that.
good idea, I'll pass that along to the right folks
i think you might be wanting to head over to Linkscape proper for that level of detail dude ;)
This. Looks. Awesome.
Brilliant work guys. Thanks!
Looks great! Been playing with it & it's a very nice awesome tool. I can't wait until enough people see the value of this that Y! site explorer drifts away like a bad single, and the gurus at SEOmoz make this the one stop shop for all data-intellegence findings for a website in regards to seo.
Great work SEOmoz!
You've no idea how much fun I've had with this already today :D
Great work guys
Got to play around with this a bit yesterday and it was pretty fun, good data, nice design, all around a great tool!
I love the "Branding" of this new site and its strategy to capture what will be a void in link data in the near Bing future. Great work Moz!
This tool is so great. Spent all day yesterday playing around on it, and plan to do the same for the next few days. Glad Im a Pro member.
Good job! We've already found this of use for a couple of client sites.
Really nice tool - loads of useful informatinn but presented in a clear concise manner.
 Would be great if you could export the link comparison list as a CSV.
 Nice work !!
we're adding CSV export all over the place, but I'll pass this on since I don't think we've got it here. In the meantime, you could run the reports separately and get two csvs (since that would basically be the same thing you'd get in that view)
You've done it again! Thanks so much. 1000% better than Yahoo site explorer and just in time.
I've been using Advanced Link Manager, which pulls data from the engines' link queries. I liked their ratios of unique domains, referers, IPs, etc., but the sampled data bothered me for large sites. OSE gets its data from its crawl, not link queries. More data, yes. Excellent. But no tie back to the engines? Is a backlink valuable if it's not recognized by Google, Yahoo, etc.? Of course you could argue that if Linkscape found it, so should the major engines' bots. Still, something to keep in mind. Thoughts?
I don't know that any one tool will ever be perfectly matching the data set any one search engine has behind it's curtain. I suppose on a large scale linkscape or other third party link analysis tools are not likely to find a large number of links that the engines don't. If anything I think third party tools are more likely to find links and count them while the engines find them and discount or disvalue in ways we can't and may never fully understand.
This is a really excellent question, and something we're thinking about as the index grows. However, for now, I'd say our experience and that of our users has been that the engines have 99%+ of the stuff in Linkscape/OSE. We're not as comprehensive as Yahoo!/Google/Bing yet, but the nice part of that is we don't yet have troubles with links we've seen that they haven't.
If people knows how to use your tools correctly then I think you do not need to be like google. Its quality that matters not quantity. I would like the index to get more populated in coming years specially for some new sites.
Great work SEOmoz :) looking forward to working with this tool often!
Excellent work. I love it!
Really neat design, and tool provides loads of useful information for link analysis.
Big thumb up for SEOmoz :D Thanks.
This is a delight to use. It is very usable and self explanatory.
 So often in the SEO world so much knowledge is assumed. Not in this case - WELL DONE to the front end team.
 I am sure that backend team have also done a great job as there were some new knowledge that I need to go and work on.
 I will have to see how I am going to include in my budget PRO. The question now is what to cut
Nice tool Rand! It's a new year gift for SEOs :)
It's fantastic! Worth every penny...
For this I love SEOmoz even more.
And I can only imagine what you guys have up your sleeves for the future. :)
Great work SEOmoz team, it really is.
Didn't have much of a chance to play with it this evening (nor the OSE [/british-humour]) but it's looking fantastic. I had a play around with some of the different metrics and functions and it seems to work well.
I'm going to be having a chat with the boss at work to see if he can justify upgrading my account to pro. At the moment the methods they're using are good, but mostly on-site. There are other methods that are being used, but I'm going to push the in-house SEO (including PPC management, off-site, on-site etc) as much as possible. I think it's essential.
A tool like this will make my life much easier :-)
Great looking tool. Enjoying watching the marketing behind this and can't wait to see the case study in a few months.Â
Well done!
Absolutely love the new tool and I'll use the heck out of it.
I think the only feature that I still desparately want is the same issue that I have with Yahoo Site Explorer. Please make it easier for me to see what's changed. I can do this to some extent by sorting or slicing and dicing raw data but it would make my life much easier if I could do historical comparisions right within the tool...either at predefined or a custom intervals. What new links have I received? Which have I lost? Maybe even help me find changes in anchor text. I dunno.
Thanks for this great new toy!
More campaign focus, and historical tracking is something we care deeply about. I can assure that we get lots of feedback along these lines and are taking that very seriously :)
I really LOVE the comparison features!
 Kodus to Seomoz..
Just noticed, the comparison is missing the comparison of anchor texts and percentages! Would be great if you guys could add that as well..
Great suggestion - we'll add that to the feature requests for V2. Thanks!
Hey Rand and gang, this looks awesome, I've been playing with all the stats I've got out now for two hours and I must say, it makes me look in a new way on a couple of things. I've also checked all the clients sites, so I know where to go. :D
Great tool, with just one quick question:
Through the 'Anchor Text Distribution' tab I can see that one of my keywords is way down the list with 2 linking pages & 2 links. How can I quickly find out which pages & domains those links are on?
If I go back to the 'Linking Pages' tab & search for that anchor text, it could be on any one of 500 pages.
Is there something I am missing?
You can use www.seomoz.org/linkscape (the advanced reports) to see this today, but it's definitely functionality we want to add into OSE long term.
Thanks for this. Again, Great tool - I'm just being selfish wanting everything right now :)
Great tool! I've been having a play with it, and it looks fantastic! The interface is nice and clear, so pretty easy to navigate
As well as normal sites, I've tried to crawl three shops so far though, and none of them come back with any data... which is a little odd. They're all linked to/have links out, are root domains etc..
Fresh content, and sites that only have a handful of links are tougher for us to get to. If you PM me the sites, I can investigate a little bit more.
Wonderfull tool, I have tried it already and check all my blogs and websites!
But a nice article never the less. :)
totally awesome tool... im just wondering why you would split something so linkbaitish onto a separate domain
Read the article! :P
Why is OSE on a separate domain?
Three big reasons, actually:
Interesting answers, as I too was reconsidering the opportunity to return using to microsites (in an intelligent way)... as it is something I'd like to propose to an hosting company that offers many other genres of services too not directly related to hosting.
And about the API... they're great (having some devs friends studying them in order to apply to my website).
be sure to check out our api wiki and our api group where we'll post news, fixes, howtos, etc.
YAY! First! :P
Seriously, this is such an amazing tool. I have been using it for about two days, and it has SOOOOO MUCH data it makes my head spin.
Yet another reason why SEOmoz Pro Membership is worth every penny.
Cheers to you, SEOmoz!
LOL! Celebrate the little victories, that's what I say.
Thumbs up for being first. :)
Ouch! 4 thumbs down?
The glory of posting first comes with a high tax :P
Yeah Nick, but I was only patting him on the back as he seemed so happy about it. Then I got thumbed down! And I was so close to the next ranking level [sob :*( ]
Thumbs down for bragging about being first.
 Thats sooooo 1998 :P