Dave Naylor made a tweet last week observing the difference shown by his new geo-location tool using backlinks pointing to his domain from Majestic and Google. We actually missed this tweet but were kindly pointed to by our friends at Wordtracker. It is very nice to be referred to as “majestic“, but at the same time it is a bit hard to catch such tweets when there is no SEO word around it.
Before we looked into specifics we wanted to check if the top 50 domains that Google show are also present in our list of 7,541 known referring root domains with backlinks pointing to Dave’s site. It turns out that 43 out of 45 (that’s over 95%!) of the root domains in Google’s top list are also in the list of backlinks that we have for his site. This means that even though they may not have made it into the top 50 domains ranked by number of backlinks, we actually had backlinks found from them in our data set!
Did it surprise you to learn that we’ve matched 95%+ of Google’s top referring domains? You should not be, as we’ve been running this sort of index quality analysis comparisons since 2007, we only stopped doing it once we found that we were matching over 90% of referring domains from both Yahoo and Google. Since then our index has grown by 500%.
So why is Top 50 referring domains in our data is different from that of Google? Majestic database shows backlinks “as is”, or more precisely “as they were found” in our trillion URLs index. Some of the stranger domains in our Top 50 list included www.zippy.co.uk (50k backlinks) and adcentercommunity.com (42k), in the first instance majority of them were redirecting to Dave’s site and in the second case it was blog roll type of link present many pages. It is easy to exclude these domains from analysis on our site using the domain Analysis Options.
While we don’t know for sure, we believe that Google uses a subset of their complete web graph in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Can one be certain they include all the backlinks they come across with? Probably not, but in our case you can be certain that we show you all we’ve got and that seems to match Google’s data nicely!
- Historic Index Update - July 26, 2015
- July Historic Index Update Published - July 31, 2014
- April Historic Index Update - April 16, 2014
Good to have a competitor to Webmaster tools.
November 2, 2009 at 4:55 pmlol .. You guys never call yourselves Majestic SEO 😉 look at all the posts on your blog how often do you mention SEO…
but in fairness it was just a random Tweet 🙂 and wasn’t ment to show MJ-12 in a bad light I like both data stores and I won’t be giving up using you guys anytime soon 🙂
Dave
November 2, 2009 at 6:43 pmWe actually thought you’ve shown us in a very good light Dave, so thanks for that! 🙂
Calling us Majestic is perfectly fine… just if you do so on twitter please @MajesticSEO so that we won’t miss it 😉
November 2, 2009 at 7:39 pmGoogle uses a subset ?
November 5, 2009 at 3:45 pmInteresting, i will remember it for next time on my blog
😉
Got a bit confused by the title !, because I’ve started using Majestic SEO after Dave Naylor mentioned it as one of his recommended tools at SEOMOZPro training in London. Anyway I’ve always had a feeling that Google is a subset of majestic (from a BL point of view), I like the detailed analysis of majestic.
November 23, 2009 at 6:44 am