Why hello there! You're looking marvelous today, you really are. And, in other good news, Open Site Explorer has a bit of a new look—and an entirely new section called "Link Opportunities" to help make some link prospecting tasks easier and more automated. Come with me and I'll show you; it'll be fun :-)
The new look
We know a lot of folks liked the old tab structure but we ran out of space. With this redesign we now have the flexibility to add new features and functionality simply by popping in new sections on the left sidebar menu. It's a little bit more like Moz Analytics, too, and we figure some cohesion between our products is probably wise.
- New side navigation with plenty of room to grow and add new features (spam scoring and analysis, for example, will be coming in Q4—but shhh... I didn't actually ask for permission to talk about that yet. I figure begging forgiveness will work.)
- Improved filtering that lets you slice and dice your link data more easily.
- Notice How Fast the New OSE Is? Oh yeah, that's the stuff :-)
You can still access the old Open Site Explorer's design for a few more weeks, but the new features will exist only in the new version.
Introducing the new link opportunities section
Need help finding outreach targets for your link building campaign? We're introducing three new reports that will help you build a curated list of potential targets. The new reports are available to all Moz Pro subscribers. If you're a community member, sign up for a Moz Pro Free Trial and you, too, can kick it with the new functionality.
Reclaim links
A filtered view of Top Pages that lets you easily export a ranked list of URLs to fix.
Unlinked mentions
Powered by FreshScape, you can use Fresh Web Explorer queries to find mentions of a brand or site without links. Ping sources that may have talked about your brand, website, people, or products without giving you a link and you can often encourage/nudge that link into existence (along with the great SEO benefits they bring)
Link intersect
Find pages that are linking to your competitors but not you. By entering two competitive domains (they don't have to be directly competitive; anyone you think you should be on lists with, or mentioned by the press alongside, is a good candidate), you can see pages that link to those sites but not yours. Getting creative with your targets here can reveal loads of awesome link opportunities.
This, however, is just the beginning. Be on the lookout for additional insights and opportunities as we improve our link index—we've just recently grown the size of Freshscape, which powers Fresh Web Explorer and two of the sections in link opportunities, so you should find lots of good stuff in there, but it can be a challenge. If you're struggling with query formatting or getting creative around potential opportunities, let us know (in the comments or via Q&A) and we can give you some pointers or maybe find some searches that do the trick.
What about the old OSE?
We changed the workflow a bit and want to make sure you've got time to adjust. If you're cranking through monthly reports or audits and want a more familiar OSE experience, you can switch to OSE Classic for a limited time. Just click on the "View in OSE Classic" link in the top right, and we'll default to the old version.
But keep in mind new features and enhancements, like improved performance and Link Opportunities, will only be available in the new release. We'll keep OSE Classic active until December 3rd in case you're feeling nostalgic.
We'd love your feedback
If you're using the new OSE and find problems, wish we'd change something, or have a particularly awesome experience, we'd love to hear from you in the comments below, in Q&A, or (especially if your issue is urgent/something broken) via our help team.
Some notes about Link Intersect in particular for those who may be using it:
In the short term, if you want MORE data about intersects than what you see in this particular feature, I'd strongly recommend heading over to https://freshwebexplorer.moz.com/ and using the operators there plus the "4 weeks" timeframe to maximize your potential opportunities.
For example, if you run this query (rd:tripadvisor.com rd:kayak.com -rd:expedia.com) and choose "4 weeks" you can see lots more intersecting link opportunities. You can also expand this to not just links, but mentions, too!
Thanks for the great feedback and feel free to follow up!
Just when I thought Moz couldn't get any better! :)
Will take time to feel true power of new design and leaving old design is good decision.
I think that i have small issue due bookmarks. On mine Safari i type opensite... and suggestion appear about https://opensiteexplorer.org/ And this is ok. The problem is that i hit 3 redirects later. opensiteexplorer.org -> www.opensiteexplorer.org -> https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ -> https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/
Ok - this isn't first world problem, but waiting for that 3 redirects is too long.
Great point! We should make that redirect go directly. I'll ping the team ASAP. Thanks for the catch Peter.
UPDATE: This is now fixed!
Hey Rand on a new campaign - shouldn't pulling in 20 keywords take less than a week like the messaging states?
I think that might be a Moz Analytics issue - you should email help at moz dot com - and let them know your campaign and they can figure out what's going on. It should be pretty fast! Sorry about that.
Awesome! Between this and Rand's advice on keeping underwear clothing unseen, I am a changed man! Thanks for continuing to innovate evolve your products.
The link intersect tool looks awesome! Can't wait to play with it.
It's incredibly fast!
It did seem slightly quicker when exporting the data but hardly mind-blowingly quick. Retrieving data within the browser was never the problem for me or others I know using OSE.
In fairness to Steven, 'incredibly fast' is one step slower than 'mind-blowingly quick'. Both are eclipsed by 'face-meltingly rapid'.
Hi Rand! Big fan of the blog. I was just wondering if the NEW OSE still had the same ability to compare pages like the OLD OSE did, and if so, where might I find it located, and if not, could you look into integrating it into the NEW OSE? Thanks Rand! Keep Up the Great Work!
Yes - indeed it does have the compare functionality. It's located in the left-hand-side menu just above "link opportunities." The tab is still called "Compare Link Metrics." For example, here's a link: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons?site... and if you click the "Add URL" button, you can add up to 5 sites to compare against.
I'm curious as to why you need to plug in two competitors to use the link opportunity features? For our vertical that is not likely to produce any results and I'm sure the same applies for others.
Hello,
Good tool, nice-lloking interface, but i have few comments:
1. The link intersect tool is an "imitation" of majestic link hunters, but if finds significantly fewer results than majestic tool, esepecially for french websites. Here is an example, where i used he very same 2 domains in majestic link hunter, then in moz link intersect tool ---> The result is: 199 results for majestic, while none for moz tool. Proof screenshotfor majestic: https://i.imgur.com/eg96Er3.png
Screenshot for moz: https://i.imgur.com/4IWyHHd.png
---> Plus majestic tool lets you compare up to 5 domains.
2. The reclaim links tool does exactly what Google WMT does in the craxl error section. It pulls all 404 with your domain (1000 limit to be shown for one time, then it lists more, and that's a lot more than Moz tool) and it lists the links to those urls (external and internal). So, you can redirect or reclaim the links to link to the right new location.
3. The citation finder works better than the 2 above.
Sorry to say that, but you still have a lot of work to do to impove this tool ! I'd like to sawy "wow, i love this tool and it works great (like most of comments), but that's simply not True. Moz are good in terms of IM education and information , but not in terms of research tools, especially for advanced campaigns.
Thanks
Hi Rikano - Thanks for the feedback. As I noted in my comment above, we're working on making the link intersect more comprehensive and able to use the full index (so it can show a greater number of results and opportunities). For reclaim links, GWMT does often show good stuff, too, and I'd certainly suggest folks use it, but there's a few features they won't show (like PA/302s/etc).
We're working hard to improve our research tools. If you have more feedback or things you'd like to see, please feel free to submit them (to me directly, in blog comments, or via our feature request forum: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pr...)
Ok Rand. I'll update you via email.
thanks
Rand - This comment made me think of you as Willy Wonka!
"Come with me and I'll show you; it'll be fun :-) " ........
and the "snozberries taste like snozberries!!!"
Thanks for the updated OSE!
Just used it quickly, and I can already see better value in this tool now, I love the 'link opportunities' addition
Hey Rand,
This looks great!
By the way... Just as a suggestion for a new update, how about the ability to upload a csv of your keywords with their accompanying local search volumes - so that these always appear in Moz, just like keyword labels, and are also exportable and sortable. Within the Moz interface I always need to export and then run them through Google's Keyword Planner for volume before producing reports - it would also be great for an at-a-glance view of the performance of your most searched for keywords within Moz itself.
Gavin
Hi Gavin - great suggestion for the Moz Analytics team! I'll ping them about this.
thanks for information about moz...
very useful for me
Fantastic work Moz team!
Great to see the steady pick up in product feature releases and bug fixes. The link opportunities tool looks awesome. Looking forward to seeing the lik intersect tool improve, but this along with the insights feature in Moz Analytics is a huge step forward.
Thank you for adding this extra value to my subscription :)
Great job, yet again, Moz Team!! Loving the new layout and can't wait to dig deeper into the new features. Thank you! - Patrick
The new link earning opportunities section is fantastic, a godsend almost. Love the interface, too.
after long time we saw a new thing in OSE , That is awesome. We really Like the features. They Just Elaborated the all things
You gotta update faster and increase your data to catchup with majestic and ahrefs. OSE by far has the least amount of data and is the slowest to index new links.
Also missing a bulk feature, which is existent in ahrefs and majestic.
Overall the backend of OSE if lagging way behind.
It would be certainly interesting to know how much Rand and the team believes Moz have closed the gap with the other big two services. Not that you can directly compare them in some ways as OSE isn't available as a stand alone product...
In my opinion, we're about 1/2 the size we need to be to be competitive. Our index often has the most links that are still live and the highest quality ones, but we know that folks want ALL the links, not just those from the more reputable or high quality sites (and even on those, we need to crawl deeper and faster). So, yeah, it's a priority - in fact, there's a whole team that's focused on nothing else but size and freshness for 2+ years - we've rebuilt the entire architecture of Mozscape from scratch, and in 3-6 months, you should see the fruits of that labor.
Good to hear that!
Hi Rand, it's an innovative look comes from a great thought but how could a free member benefit from this? just for one month! Link opportunities is a good begin but it will be great if it adds value for free members as well.
AMAZING!!!! I LOVE THE NEW OSE.
...ok, I just had to try the all caps thing. Traffikon was right, it is enticing. ;)
Amazing update! Always love the Moz!
The new version surely looks good, but am I missing a feature from the old one? You could enter multiple domains and match them up against each other.
Is that possible with the new version of OSE?
Unfortunately, you'll need to do that one at a time now. We're also working to make the results more comprehensive - should launch that in January!
Moz really improving day by day and tool tool!I find it very interesting Link intersect.
I tried MOZ its really easy to use and it shows where exact i want.Wonderful !!! really i love it.
Wow, great tools!!
I can't really say that you can't find the features elsewhere, but, sure enough it's great that Moz have them now as well.
A quick video overview of the new features.
THIS. IS. AWESOME!!!!!
I am excited to try out the new link building features. Congrats on a good job with a much needed re-design!
Open Site Explorer is my favorite tool for what we do. I enjoy hearing that your working on making it even better. Thanks Moz for making my subscription worth it. Keep up the great work.
We use OSE and are very pleased with its capabilities. This slight redesign will help webmasters to analyze backlink and anchors of our own sites very effectively as well as those of competition.
We use OSE and are very pleased with its capabilities. This slight redesign will help webmasters to analyze backlink and anchors of our own sites very effectively as well as those of competition.
With features like these you have got me a Pro Subscriber :)
Excellent timing as I'm about to do a fair amount of link building for a new site; thanks for continuing to build new tools as part of the subscription.
New look of tool is better, faster and catch more links. Keep doing good job fellows.
Hi Rand, we bought MOZ Pro last week for our organization, and now this feature looks more handy.
Simply great stuff!
Looks great! Thanks for developing these great tools :)
The Moz research tools are great, I use them on a daily basis; however, the Moz Pro campaigns seemingly don't get the same attention from the Moz team. It's great to have new OSE features, but I'd really appreciate if you guys fixed the Moz Pro campaign bugs and missing features as well.
We had so many issues with the campaigns and the reports in the last 12 months that we're planning to downgrade from the Premium package to Standard.
Hi Gyorgy - are you using the old "SEOmoz Pro" tool or have you migrated to Moz Analytics? If you're using the latter, they're making upgrades and fixes every couple weeks and have added quite a few awesome features (I believe the next ones scheduled are the ability to track local rankings, and they just came out with faster crawls and better onboarding features for new campaigns). If you have a request, please drop a line to Matt Brown - MJB at moz dot com - he's the product architect there and can definitely assist.
Thanks, Rand. I do appreciate your quick reply. We use the new Moz Analytics and always email the support team when find a bug or missing feature. I will email Matt next time we have a problem or suggestion.
Nice post; a pretty nice explanation about this new useful tool
Glad to know that Link Intersect tool is back :)
Sorry to say but it is true, I am not impressed with MOZ Tool's trail version. I analyze my website and I found....
1. Old Data - It only shows old data. Google webmaster is faster than this tool. Some back links are crawled by Google 2 month ago but this tool is not showing these links but webmaster is showing, while almost all seo experts say that webmaster is very slow but I think webmaster is better than moz tool. Moz tool is showing only 22 root domains of my site (cgcolors.com) but ahrefs is showing 56. Why?
2. What is the benefit of PA and DA - DA and PA are also not helpful for me because this tool shows good DA and PA for Banned websites or spammed websites also (by Google long time ago). When I searched some query on Google some websites show on top which have low PA and DA but in bottom some websites have good PA and DA, why?
3. Why it shows my own 301 redirection URL - Why it shows my website’s inner page urls in back links while I am using 301 redirection.
I have also sent you a mail on 5 sep. but you didn’t give me a proper answer. I hope you will solve my problem as soon as possible.
Hi CgColors - sorry youv'e had a poor experience. Let me see if I can help.
1) It's true that we aren't as fast as Google in crawling/indexing the web. Part of that is how our processing cycles work. In order to calculate metrics like MozRank/MozTrust/PA/DA/etc and build all the sorts and filters that are in our API, it takes between 15-20 days of processing. That means we might have crawled a site/page up to 40-50 days before it makes it's way into the index, whereas Google is on a schedule closer to 7-14 days for their oldest stuff (usually - on occassion, they, too have cached data a month or two old, but it's rare).
That said, we do have a very fresh index via "Just Discovered Links" that you might want to check out in OSE as well. It's not as comprehensive, but it does show anything that's been shortened with bit.ly (who helps provide us with data) and anything that's appeared on the fresh web (in blogs, RSS feeds, news sites, etc)
2) PA and DA are typically considered beneficial because they correlate highly with stronger rankings ability. That said, they do not, as you point out, take into account spam factors. We actually have a spam score we'll be releasing in the next 60-90 days that can help with that filtering and is highly correlated with sites Google has penalized/banned.
3) We try to show all kinds of link equity passing pages, and 301s are among these (along with rel=canonical). So, if you have pages that are 301 redirecting to your site, we'll show these in your links.
Hope that helps!
Thank you so much sir.. You replied me and gave your valuable time. Yes, I have poor experience in this field as compare to you. I am nothing before you.
Actually I am totally depend on your tool because I have a lot of SEO projects and I always use those link building sites which have 35+ DA in your tool. I mean to say I always check website quality using moz tool.
I always analyze my competitor using MOZ tool. I follow your rules regarding Google or SEO. My earning, my business totally depend on you. That's why I asked some questions in my first comment because these are mandatory for me or my business.
I have totally satisfied with your reply. Thank you again, All the best for your future tool's updates. I wish, you will give us a best tool in future. I really appreciate your work and sorry if I hurt you.
Amazing stuff--so happy that I finally upgraded to pro!
Steady improvement on an already-awesome tool.. slick new layout to boot, nice work from all involved, keep it up!
Great update!
Love the ability to reclaim links, jumping straight on this w/ my clients to make sure these dead links are sorted
:)
Amazing Rand! What's the next?! An email sender to write to the webmasters for ask links?? :-) Great work MOZ Team, thanks.
Ha! No, but we are working on extracting social profiles from sites so you can see the Twitter/G+/FB/LinkedIn/etc accounts associated and make faster connections there :-)
Hi Rand,Just one question about the Interlink new function: why basing it on Freshwebexplorer and not simply moving the similar tool Moz still has in the Lab? That one seems looking up to a bigger pool of backlinks.
Agreed - it does, and I'm trying to get us to switch. It's simply a question of bandwidth, scale, and hardware. We're working on getting the services up and running as fast as possible to use the full index (as per my comment above).
On the "Reclaim links" section I spotted you seem to be able to look up different status codes, what can the tool detect?
It looks at anything on that list - 4xx, 302, 5xx - right now. Are there other status codes you'd want to see?
Awesome stuff! Well done Rand and the Moz team! My head is buzzing with the possibilities :)
These development are awesome. But, I'd love to see the diversed search index volume.
The Tool is Amazing Rand !
Me too! We're working hard to grow the index - you might have noticed that this last one (at 180 Billion URLs) is our largest ever and up from last month's 130 Billion page index. Next year, we hope to be able to grow 3X that size and be quite a bit fresher, too.
That will be completely awesome! Just wanted to know will you still emphasize on Twitter for indexing the links or you'll go with some other options?
Thanks Rand for future planning to improve the number of Indexing.
Wonderful! I love it
çok iyi
This is pure gold.
I Want to ask something , But I Know no one cares to read or reply for mine .
Do you guys actually recommend or atleast talk about some link building softwares like GSA Search engine ranker , Internet Business Promoter , SENukeX .
I Want to convey that I Got good results using IBP & Senuke . Do you people agree or atleast care to speak something about this??
A REPLY TO A QUESTION WITH CAPS LOOKS ENTICING , YEAH! IF YOU READ THIS REPLY , YOU NEED TO READ THE QUESTION ABOVE , THANKS :)
Your best bet if you want a discussion about it is to write about it in the Q&A section. You will find most users here will not use GSA, SEnuke etc. because its leaning very close to black hat and most tactics here are aiming to work within Google guidelines (e.g white hat). Also the topic you have commented on has nothing to do with link building with automated tools which is again why you've currently got no responses.
Try the Q&A section here -
https://moz.com/community/q
Chris' suggestion is a good one, and I generally agree. Tools like the ones you've mentioned are often high risk, and Moz isn't about helping folks with short term tactics, but rather long-term, safe bets that are within Google's/Bing's guidelines.
If you get "good results" with SENuke, chances are they were very short-term results. And quite frankly, I think over time you will get ZERO results. Anything that can be scaled and automated is going the way of the dinosaur. Unless you want to churn and burn domains constantly, you will struggle to have success with tools like the ones mentioned above.
It's how you choose to use the tools rather than the tools you choose to use. It's also worth bearing in mind that whatever is Google 'best practice' now, might be a ranking penalty in 12 months time. She's a fickle beast.