Today I am proud to announce the launch of the second version of Open Site Explorer. Since SEOmoz has officially moved out of consulting, we are now able to put our full resources into building fantastic SEO software. We want to thank all of you who provided feedback on the first version of the tool for your guidance and we look forward to hearing more from you in the future.
Now enough with the chit chat, on to the new features!
New Features:
- Top Pages on a Domain
- Target URL
- Comprehensive CSV Export
- Usability Enhancements (The end of page reloads when applying filters!)
- Improved Filtering
Top Pages on a Domain
With the new version of Open Site Explorer you can get a sorted listed of the top 10,000 pages on a domain. This is essential for viewing your own site and for doing competitive analysis.
With this new feature, we can see that Microsoft is unwisely 302 redirecting their homepage! Doh!
You can also see which content is drawing the most links on your competitors websites. In this example we see that that these are the most linked to comics on XKCD.
Target URL
The new version of Open Site Explorer shows you which URL a given link is targeting when you sort by sub or root domains so you can see exactly where the given link is helping you. (This is also available for all links when the data is exported as a CSV)
With this new feature you can see which link is most important to Harvard.edu's domain and which page it is linking to.
Comprehensive CSV Export
After lots of input, we are now offering more robust CSV exports.
The new CSV exports offer:
- The Target URL of the given link
- Numbers of links to the given source page
- Indication of whether or not the linked is followed
- Indication of whether the link is internal or external
Usability Enhancements
Remember how you used to have to reload the page every time you applied a filter in Yahoo! Site Explorer?
With the addition of the Filter Results button, these needless page reloads are a thing of the past.
Common Tasks are Easier to Perform
New buttons make performing common tasks easier and faster to do.
The new Explore and Compare buttons make it easier to get more information about any links you find interesting.
Improved Filtering
With the new version of this tool you can do even more filtering to drill down into what you think is important.
In this example, we filtered the data to show only followed (dofollow) and 301 redirecting external links to the specific page.
Open Site Explorer vs. Linkscape vs. Yahoo! Site Explorer
Throughout this process, we also heard a lot of questions about the differences between Yahoo! Site Explorer, Open Site Explorer and Linkscape. The chart below lays out the similarities and differences.
Help us Improve!
Are there other features you want to see? Are we moving in the right direction? We want know! Please feel free to share your suggestions and opinions via SEOmoz on Twitter, SEOmoz on Facebook or in the comments below :-)
This seems like the best all-in-one SEO tool I've ever seen.
To be honest this is the first time I've ever read any post on this blog, although I am kind of learning SEO on my own.
Also, this is my first comment here (obviously).
Seems like there is a long week in front of me to see everything what this great site has to offer.
Hah hah Davor. I've got some good news and bad news for you.
The good news is that this site has enough to suck you in for a month.
The bad news? You're going to lose a month :)
Good point! But to loose a month on SEOmoz is never a month lost ;)
Davor...keep at it. Lucky for you this was the first post you read and not something like "URL Canonicalization" or "pagination!" I would suggest searching these terms for additional valuable posts:
"headsmacking"
"checklist"
"cheat sheet"
Those should lead you to VERY valuable information as a begnner. Welcome to the community!
I'm not really a beginner, I rather consider myself as an "advanced newcomer" when it comes to SEO.
I've been hitting top 3 positions for various long-tail keywords - that was a part of bum marketing and stuff like that.
However, I realized that approach is soon going to have its end. I have been gaining competition ever since, and bum marketing is not as easy as it was before, because there are a lot less long tails with decent monthly searches left without moderate or even serious competition, and even some long tails with just 30-50 monthly searches aren't that easy any more.
However, when it comes to "real" SEO (I mean one or two words phrases) - well, I am lacking in knowledge about that.
Things you mentioned - canonical URLs and pagination - that is something I still have to fully understand.
Haven't had time to have a good play until now, I cannot believe you're giving away that much free data to registered users. May have to cancel my pro membership :)
I honestly love the OSE. I've been using linkscape for a while now and it's really awsome to see new tools built by you guys :)
It still doesn't seem to do something that would be dead handy: when I do a competitve analysis, I can't filter out links from domains that we both have, so I always have to double check that I don't already have them before going after them! The CSV export can solve that, I suppose, but I would prefer doing it all on OSE.
The flip side would be to filter the links so that they only showed links from domains that we both have, so I can see if some sites that are linking to me already might be up for doing it even more!
Great tool.
This is a great suggestion and it is on our very long to do list. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you Kate, I'll be checking it three times a day! :)
This tool just keeps getting better and better. I'd echo what jdeb said above and I REALLY look forward to the new toolbar release with (hopefully) a dedicated button for OSE.
The new toolbar is coming out very soon :)
It will have a lot of new functionality and we are really excited about it :)
Maybe it'll be finished in time to be in my Easter basket? :)
Hopefully :)
We are just working through some last bugs/issues, but the plan is very soon.....
Danny, This is really great tool....
BTW I used this tool first time... I found this is really very useful tool for the SEO...
Thanks to SEOmoz.
Hey Danny,
Really glad to see the update and have a bit of a play with it! It looks really quality and I'm glad to see you guys keep evolving!
I just wanted to see if you might be able to share whether the link data had been updated as well or if that is still on schedule for March 11th (ish).
Thanks a lot!
We are still on track for March 11.
I just took a peek at Chas's screen and I think things are looking good :)
Excellent! Thanks very much for the update.
Love the improvements and thank you for using XKCD in your example, it made for a great laugh this morning :)
Love the new improvements you've added - although OSE was fantastic before so this just sort of.. elevates it even higher! I found the differences between OSE, Linkscape and Y!SE intestesting to look at too - and thanks to goodnewscowboy for explaining why there was such a big difference between the results :)
This is a great tool. Some other free tools are availbale in market but tis has been coming out really well after new fetaure sets.
Awesome, Danny!
With top pages implemented in OSE, I don't have to go through mozlab again (once you've trapped into mozlab, there is no button to go back :S)
My suggestion to the tool
short term
- Increase the number of sites you can compare (for pro only), I think it can "force" more people to join us and make pro membership look more valuable
long term
- keep working on indexation
- Implement a function which provides some actionable tips after link analysis (this could be really hard I guess because every website is different)
some great improvements.
One suggestion - It would be really handy to show a list of unique domains. For instance, when I go to the 'Linking Domains' tab I can see *.blogspot, *.wordpress, etc...
But I'd like to further drilldown on *.blogspot to see a the list of blogspot hosted sites that have linked. Perhaps there are 20 or so different blogspot hosted blogs linking to my site - I'd like to see this quickly.
Currently I'm doing this manually from the downloaded CSV file and it takes a long time. This would be a great timesaver.
Looking forward to more great tools and improvements - great job!
Good gracious! im gonna try OSE right now! :)
Thank you for integration of Top Pages Tool with Open Site Explorer and for CSV export! Great stuff guys!
- Evan
Thanks for adding the new features. I look forward to using them as this is by far one of my favorite seo tools to use. Simplicity is nice.
This is a great news ! The first version was very usefool for backlinks analysis. Now, this tool is certainly the best one I'm using for these diagnostics !
Your team's work is so good !!!
It's great news that you've updated Open Site Explorer. I'm trying to utilise it more and more but it's hard with my silly standard membership :-(.
I know this is a ridiculously late comment but I've been inundated with work and my ReadItLater application that I just bought is helping me get on top of things a lot.
By the way, just a small sidenote - is there a mobile version of this site? It could be a perfect opportunity for you to develop an iPhone application and mobile site that allows users to read and comment on the move. The comment popup that's used at the moment doesn't work well in Safari for iPhone :-(
Thanks for the comparison.
I was originally thinking of using Linkscape although now I'm leaning towards OSE since it less complex.
I'll probably warm myself up with OSE then move onto Linkscape when I'm a bit more confident.
Improved CSV exporting is a real help, since I can present this in a report or organise them into a chart for presentations and demonstrations. Thanks
For some reason it is saying that most of my pages don't have titles but when I check them with SEO Chrome extension I see page title, H1 tags, etc. Is the problem on my end or yours?
When we say "no data" it means there might have been some issue crawling the page. It may have been down at the time, took too long to return to us, or maybe we saw links to the page but didn't attempt to crawl. It's not that there's no title element, it's just that we don't know what the title was because we didn't crawl the page.
I am trying to export link data using OSE. I have 3400 links for a url but when i export it it comes down to 50 links only why so ?
please dont flame the idiot...
but why is there such a difference in indexed links on Y:SE compared to OSE?
It's a good question theexo51, and I'm pretty sure it's because Yahoo has had more time and resources to crawl the web. Linkscape (the data behind OSE)is a much newer product.
But even though OSE has less data, overall it is still as useful if you work in percentages.
For example, if in Yahoo your site has 2000 links and your competitor has 4000 links, then the ratio is 1:2.
If in OSE your site has 500 links then chances are good that your competitor will show 1000 links (same 1:2 ratio)
thanks for the hint...
everyone uses Y:SE as the standard, but my understanding is that support for it is being discontinued so an alternative is much needed.
As an SEO, when talking to clients about link building all too often we need a metric to measure, Yahoo are quick at updating so its so easy to point at this resource.
I think everyone will be in a similar place of having to find alternative sites to list how many indexed links there are as proof of work, but its so hard to find anywhere/anyone that can provide an equivilent
I too think that with the MS/Yahoo partnership, Yahoo SE is living on borrowed time. Which is why I think it was pure brilliance on the part of SEOmoz to create and publish the OSE tool.
As far as being able to show your clients positive linking metrics, personally I am a fan of showing concrete results as opposed to markers like rankings or link counts.
Morning, noon and night I preach conversion, conversion, conversion.
re: "borrowed time." I agree.
And we're hoping the community will help us with more great ideas and requests to continuously improve OSE, so we all have the metrics and reports we need at our fingertips.
That's a good way of looking at things.
I'd also add that the links that appear to be missing in OSE tend to be low value links. I did some comparisons between OSE and Y:SE for a smaller site, and it looked like the links that were in Y:SE but not in OSE were primarily either from sites with few inlinks or comment pages.
Awesome guys - well done a cool tool just got cooler.
Exported file shows this in the heading -
www.OpenSiteExplorer.org/www.seomoz.org/a!links!!f!follow!!o!page_authority!!p!1!!s!external!!t!page
Would rather see a human readable list of filters and their set values.
These new additions are hugely helpful and just what it needed.
Thanks!
Thanks for all the improvements!
Well done once again on the updates.
However there's just a tiny little suggestion, not sure if its just me that can't find it but when you use the filter and it gives you an updated list, is there a way of knowing the exact number of links without going to the very end of list.
Like "Links 1-50 of 300" or something like that? Because since you've done the filter the total number of links at the top is no longer right.
Like I said, don't know if someone has already suggested this or its actually there somewhere and I just can't find it...
Thanks
Thanks so much for pointing this out. This is a known issue that is caused because we are approximating the total number pages of links on initial page load for performance reasons (since getting all the links would really slow things down). For some sites this works fine, but for others you can observe some weirdness. We will continue to be improving this product over time and addressing these types of things.
Just a quick question, slighly related to this post...
I am doing some freelance seo work at the moment, and although the client is going up the rankings from the on page work, they wanted a report to show whats happening and what they are paying for.
Does anyone know of any online tools or have examples of seo reports they send to clients?
My client is not very savvy and there is a danger I will over complicate things when talking about increased Alexa rank and MozRank etc.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
The Top Pages feature and the CSV export of up to 10,000 links is freakin' awesome!
But, does this mean you've also updated the linkscape database? :P
I am a huge fan of the top pages feature too :-) I use it almost daily. (is that weird?)
New Linkscape database update will be live in the very near future. :-p
Great new Features! Love the new csv export.
Export to CSV (for Excel) is working? I'm testing here now and not work. The data are separated by commas... :(
Hi Pablo,
CSV actually stands for Comma Separated Values. if this is not working for you as expected, feel free to contact sitesupport @ seomoz.org so we can get this fixed for you.
I hope that helps!