At the end of 2019, Majestic launched Related Sites. By grouping together sites that appear most often near links to each other, we brought you a new and unique way to find similar websites within our index,
Related Sites – A Recap
Before getting to the new stuff, it may be worthwhile to have a quick recap of Related Sites. If you don’t need a summary, just scroll down to the ‘What is New?’ section.
In case you missed it, Related Sites is a Site Explorer tab that shows you all of the other websites we think are most similar to the site you are analyzing. Some other tools may call this list Similar Sites, or Competitor Sites.
Here are the results for a search for the BBC homepage at bbc.co.uk.
Considering that these lists are freshly, constantly, and procedurally compiled for each site and URL using maps of the entire internet, we are incredibly proud of the results.
To help you work out what’s going on under the hood, Link Context is the glue that hold this all together. Each time we see a backlink, we scan the entire area of HTML that appears around that link. As site authors will quite often link similar sites near to each other, we can use this data to help decide which websites are related.
Here is a piece of Link Context for the Majestic Global Brand Ambassador, Dixon Jones.
This context item shows where a link to Dixon’s site is in a Link Experts section of a website, alongside many of his peers. In total, there are 10 external links in this Link Context segment. The buttons under the context will give you a table view of those links.
Once we have this list for a single backlink, we check the best of Dixon’s 7,500 other backlinks, aggregate the data, and pull out the most releated sites. This gives us a Related Sites list for Dixon that looks a bit like this next screenshot. For those of you who follow established SEOs and Digital Marketers, you’ll see a lot of familiar names and tools.
BUT… none of this is new. This is just a re-cap for your new view on this data.
What is new?
We have released a small update that brings you a fresh perspective through a scatter graph view of this data. It allows you to competitively position your site against the other domains that are most often linked near your own links.
To find the update, create any Related Sites list and press the Compare as a Graph button.
For this example, we are still looking at Dixon Jones’ website. This graph shows how Dixon’s site (the blue pin) is positioned when compared to his immediate Related Sites. You can see that he has an okay Citation Flow score (left-to-right) when compared to his peers, but could probably do with a higher Trust Flow score to bring his site closer to the pack.
Ultimately, this may not matter for a personal site. But you can imagine how this could help a website in a more competitive niche.
Most Often Linked Nearby
Another great benefit from these charts (that may not be obvious) is the size of the dot. This represents how often the website appears near a link to your site. Let’s go take a look at one of the world’s most popular restaurants.
You can see that this website is very well-positioned, compared to its peers. It has the highest Trust Flow and Citation Flow of the other Business websites (the olive green colours). You may also notice how large the circles are, when compared to the previous example. This means that the websites in this image have far more co-citations (places where links for different sites appear near each other) than the previous example.
At any point, you can hover over a circle to find out which website it represents.
In this example, I was curious to find out what the two non-olive coloured websites were, and why they are releated to a major restaurant chain. Luckily, I can click on any circle to create a Link Context filter. This shows exactly where these sites appear near each other.
In this case, lists of sponsors on sporting event websites make sure that these companies appear near each other.
Top 100 Related Sites
Not many businesses have one hundred competitors so, by default, we highlight the ten most related sites in the chart. If you’d like to plot more of your results, there is a toggle, bottom-left, to expand the graphic to show the entire top 100 Related Sites. Here is our restaurant again.
And, like the last time, you can hover over any link that piques your interest. Here we see that Related Sites has picked up the Swiss website of our restaurant.
How to Get Related Sites
We love Related Sites, and it is avaliable to ALL Majestic subscribers, from Lite to the most powerful API plans.
If you would like to take out a Majestic subscription, we strongly believe that our entry-level Lite plan is one of the best value-for-money plans among all the major backlink tools. If you have never used Majestic before, a full 7-day guarantee is available for genuinely new customers on our Lite or Pro plans.
API subscribers have a beta API command to find related sites, making it incredibly easy to get up to 100 similar sites for any URL or domain.
As always, we hope that you enjoy this latest update. If you have any feedback, ideas, or need assistance, our Customer Service team will be delighted to help.
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Hi Steve, Thanks for this information on relates sites. My name is Jerin and I work for MetroMindz – A Leading Digital Marketing Agency. So how would this application be beneficial in my day-to-day DM works?
May 27, 2021 at 7:48 amHi Jerin,
Thanks for the query.
As with so many things in search, "It Depends".
Some agencies tend to work in a market vertical ( one example of this would be in PR for Hotels ), others tend to be technical specialists who offer services to a range of businesses in a variety of different markets. Some are boutique outfits looking to offer bespoke solutions to descerning clients, others may operate in higher volume operations.
The time you have to spend on each client, the work you do with them and your understanding of their market will differ based on the nature of the Digital Marketing agency you work for.
The Related Sites tool can be used to help Digital Marketing firms understand their clients businesses better. If you engage on outreach on a clients behalf, and wish to offer a tailored service to your client, you may find it interesting to find other firms with an overlapping backlink profile.
To some extent the backlink profile represents the virtual neighbourhood a client business sits in. You can see who gets links near to links your client gets.
Understanding this neighbourhood may be able to help you serve a customer better. You may be able to see the big players in their market, you may be able to uncover potential collaborators for digital PR work in the clients supply chain.
The visualisation adds a fresh perspective on what can be an interesting underlying tool.
Hope this helps!
June 1, 2021 at 3:51 pm