Over the last year or so, the link intelligence market seems to have developed. Until you start using a tool, it’s not always easy to see the real points of difference. The things that differentiate Majestic are far more than cosmetic. Here are 5 of them.
Our data goes back over more than 5 years
Majestic search engine has been crawling the web since late 2004, with the original aim to create a community driven search engine based on a distributed computing model. We use hundreds of IPs around the world which can crawl the internet on their spare bandwidth in order to get our huge scale of data. Our index is now larger than Yahoo’s and is the largest commercially available link index on the planet with over 3.9 trillion unique URLS in our Historic Index and we crawl 1.4 billion URLs on average almost every day. We also offer several tools to allow you to view the change of data over time such as our recently launched tracking reports, as well as our Backlink History Graphs which can’t be done without the huge amount of data that we have.
Our Flow Metrics are the best in the industry and fully updates on every index update
Our Flow Metrics use an iterative process –flowing through our link map- to give you an easy to understand measurement of how effective a URL is based on the flow of a characteristic through the web. Our methodology differs from any others as we are capable of flowing any characteristic through links, starting with a known characters set. Our flow metrics consist of Citation Flow, which uses our old metric ACRank to accurately predict how influencal a site is based on the number of URLs that link to it. Whereas Trust Flow measures how trustworthy a site is by starting with a highly regarded site such as the BBC, and see where the links flow. This works because trustworthy sites tend to link to other trustworthy neighbours and those neighbours tend to link to other trustworthy neighbours and so on. These metrics can be calculated at the URL, subdomain and root levels.
Compared to the other domain metrics in the industry today we believe we have raised the bar with our metrics. Not only do we flow through external links but also internal links meaning a strong home page can influence the metrics of pages within its own site. We also crawl the whole web ourselves making our own decision on what it and isn’t trustworthy and do not use anyone else’s metrics making it pure and not affected by manual penalties in Google.
Our website returns accurate data instantly even for large domains
One of the challenges of Link Analysis is that the data you pull can often require analysis on the fly on many tools. This means that whilst link analysis is swift for domains with small link profiles, the results can take several minutes or more on larger domains. Majestic does not work like this on all major reports. Instead we have the ability to return the data almost instantly, as we pre-calculate all of our Flow metrics rather than try to work these out on the fly. This makes for a much better… much faster… user experience.
Lowest cost of entry
Many people are surprised that our pricing starts at just US$49 a month. This gives us the lowest cost of entry of any major link data source. Part of this price efficiency stems for innovation and some stems from a desire to provide the best data to the people that need it most , so we concentrate on the front end rather than an executive summary (although our Site Explorer tool does do a good job of summarising data). Even the biggest Enterprise level systems costing several thousand a month ultimately rely on our data for their link intelligence. The graph shows a comparison of our lowest paid subscription with 3 of our competitors.
We also offer a huge amount of data free to subscripting customers and give free data and reports on your own site. Our site explorer tool can be used without a paid account to get a great summary of data showing the top 10 backlinks on each tab. Our most popular free tool is the Backlink History tool allowing you to create a graph of a sites backlink history. We also offer access to the following for a user on our free package (registration required): Keyword Checker, Bulk Backlink Checker, Site Comparator, Neighbourhood checker, Link Profile Checker, Majestic Million and Clique Hunter, which is way more than our competitors offer. So even with a free account you can’t go wrong.
We are transparent, legitimate and independent
At Majestic we make our data collection methods very clear via the Majestic 12 project as well as having a transparent ownership on our about-us page. We obey the Robots.txt and clearly announce our crawlers identify when it visits sites. We don’t seek to use underhand methods to obtain data- such as Google Page Rank. We have received a number of awards which we believe gives us industry legitimacy as does the strength of some of our clients. We are fully registered in a respectable jurisdiction – England and Wales within the United Kingdom – and comply with all UK governance legislation. We believe this freedom from dubious third party dependencies, gives us a strategic advantage in the internet mapping market place.
If that doesn’t convince you what will?
- Actionable SEO – Top Pages and Link Profile - January 22, 2013
- Actionable SEO: Using Referring Domains Information - January 9, 2013
- Actionable SEO – The Fresh and Historic Indexes - December 29, 2012
I agree Chloe, at $49 a month you are very competitively priced
October 8, 2012 at 12:20 pmJust wish you guys allowed public use of your data via your API like your competitors do. Many of them allow public re-use of their data at lower entry costs. You have the OpenApps but that is quite inconvenient.
October 11, 2012 at 7:52 amHi Jeff,
I hear your pain. But OpenApps is misunderstood. It is exactly like OAuth, that’s all. You’d love it once you crack it… one click solution for your users, full API functionality for the developer.
October 11, 2012 at 8:03 am