Today we are making Majestic Site Explorer free for verified domains. We are also removing restrictions on how often you can use Site Explorer for paying users (subject to a fair use policy). Other changes include layout improvements and some new stuff for all users – but I expect that the big news will be that Site Explorer is free for your own sites.

It’s easy to set up

Screen Shot 2013-06-07 at 18.52.38

If you don’t have a free account yet on Majestic, it is simply an email verification. It takes seconds here.

Before and After functionality as a Free User

We always gave you your own back link detail for free – either in Standard reports or Advanced reports. With Site Explorer, however, the data comes back MUCH faster and is much more intuitive. The original free data was already much richer than data from (say) Google Webmaster Tools because we assess the value of every link, and tells you data about crawl dates, anchor text, redirections and other links types and most importantly we also give flow metric data for each link. Flow Metrics take a while to understand – but our training video should help you get to grips with the ideas. The big win for users is in the UI and simplicity of Site Explorer. For smaller businesses, almost all of your important link data is in the Site Explorer data being effective equivalent of Silver plan (Gold and Platinum accounts allow to go deeper). It’s quick and it’s intuitive.

Site Explorer lets you:

  • See your strongest links at a glance – with Crawl dates, Flow Metrics and anchor text.
  • Lets you see New Links and Lost links in easy to drill down charts with data being updated all the time.
  • Have an easy way to see a list of your referring domains
  • A geographical and visual map of where in the world your top 1000 referring domains are hosted
  • A clear break down of your anchor text with EASY drill down to see the exact links you have for any given anchor text.

The New Benefits for Free Users

You can easily see – for free and on a daily basis if you like – your own site’s new links. This means you can see who is talking about you. Who is linking to you. Who is affecting your brand. This arms you with the chance to leverage these new relationships. If CNN or BBC link to you, you can talk about it, shout about it… benefit better from it whilst it is still news.

You can also see where your relationships are in danger – by seeing where links are breaking to your site. Time is of the essence – sometimes these links are lost by accident in a site reorganisation. Recovering them within days is easy… getting them back when the developers have moved on is nigh on impossible. Forewarned is forearmed.

Why are we giving this data Free?

It’s something that should make life much easer for free users, who will now be able to see new and lost links for their own sites very easily without having to always delve into the standard and advanced reports. Now that we have made it so much easier for free users to verify their own sites – either through META tags or via Google authentication via our Webmaster Tools, it seems only right that free users can see the power of the paid accounts – by showing them Site Explorer information for the data on their own accounts. We hope a few free users will upgrade to paid plans once they realize just how worthwhile it is to be able to have this data for any website, sub-domain or URL.

What did you say you are giving to Paid users?

1: Unlimited use on Site Explorer (Yes… conditions apply)

We have also dropped a limitation on using Site Explorer within our back end. We used to have a number of throttles to limit users setting up programs that scrape our results. We have now dropped one of those – so unless you are doing something beyond what most people would consider “normal” you are likely to be able to use Site Explorer all month long on any account level. We do still have protections in place of course and Gold users or Platinum users get longer lists of links in site explorer. If you want to see ALL the links to a domain, then you would still require an advanced report.

2: The ability to set your default Advanced Report settings

If you want all the links to a site – whether yours or someone else’s – then you will still need an advanced report. We have found that different TYPES of users expect different information when downloading “all” their links. Some only want links that “pass link juice” but everyone has a different opinion as to how you define such a filter. Most would assume that links that no longer exist should not be in the list – whilst others feel that they ESPECIALLY want these ones more than anything. You might want to ignore links from domains you consider your own… or ones you consider penalized… or these might be the ONLY links you are interested in. After discussing this internally, we decided to let users create their own default settings for what they consider “relevant” links. Changing these settings does not affect existing reports, but will affect advanced reports you create moving forward. You access these default options in your account settings:

Screen Shot 2013-06-07 at 19.19.16

3: More intuitive access to all the other tools

We have reviewed and amended the quick links on our home page to better reflect usage patterns on the site and improved the cookie crumbs links a little to make it easier to return to your reports when navigating. We also pooled the links in the Tools tab to help users better navigate our tool set and see the various tools in some context.

Screen Shot 2013-06-08 at 12.46.25

4: More clarity on “First Found” Dates

We use two indexes. The Fresh index looks at a site’s Link position now and over the last 90 days. There was confusion, then, with the “first found” date in the Fresh Index, because no date in the Fresh Index is more than 90 days old – so what of links that existed before the 90 day range? We have fixed this with a simple “before than” symbol on dates which are near the start of this range:

Screen Shot 2013-06-08 at 12.34.32

Hovering over the “<” symbol lets you know that to find the TRUE first found date of this link, you could most likely do so by looking in the historic data, but the links ware certainly no longer “New” as they are now getting on for three+ months old and quite possibly years.

Dixon Jones
Latest posts by Dixon Jones (see all)

Comments

  • Boni Satani

    Any any feature addition always welcomed!

    Cheers!

    June 11, 2013 at 5:04 pm
  • Scott Graham

    Really great to see that you are doing this. Will definetly share this on google + and facebook

    June 11, 2013 at 5:33 pm
  • Sankar Datti

    Thanks. I love majestic SEO always. Because this is the only tool which gives the latest data which we can’t get any where. Even seomoz will give little old data.

    June 12, 2013 at 2:55 am
  • Analityk

    Wow! That’s a great news, really.

    “We hope a few free users will upgrade to paid plans once they realize just how worthwhile it is to be able to have this data for any website, sub-domain or URL. – See more at: http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/site-explorer-goes-free/#sthash.xPbcmeWW.dpuf” – I’m sure they willl and it’s a good way to acquire them.

    June 12, 2013 at 10:45 am
  • Jason

    Awesome! Going to give it a try. Haven’t used Majesticseo yet, but doing it now!

    June 18, 2013 at 2:08 am
  • Opes Media

    Well this is a great news. For the past few weeks we checked out seomoz and ahrefs but I believe we will start with MajesticSeo. Every buck counts and the fact that the Site Explorer tool is free, even for the sites that we own, that makes a huge difference. Thank you for this great tool.
    Regards

    June 18, 2013 at 4:25 pm
    • Dixon Jones

      Just for Clarity, Opes Media, – it is free FOR sites that you own. It isn’t free for sites you don’t own (or don’t control). (Have to pay for all this hardware somehow!)

      June 18, 2013 at 4:31 pm
  • James Thomas

    I was referred to your SEO tool by an associate and I really like it. It is easy to use and I feel it gives me accurate information about how my web site is doing. Thank you.

    June 19, 2013 at 11:56 am
  • Chris Stewart

    A great tool improved upon, and has the free factor rolled too!
    Marvelous !!

    Love it

    June 20, 2013 at 4:49 am
  • Mohamed Shajid

    Wow this is i expected about few years. I love Majestic SEO. I should register on it now. Probably i need to analyze my SEO Services In Sri Lanka , UAE and Singapore too. but i should take the premium option 🙂

    Thanks | Majestic SEO
    Mohamed Shajid.

    June 20, 2013 at 7:05 am
  • Andry

    One of my favourite seo tools, and glad to see this feature goes free for free user. +1 Majestic

    June 25, 2013 at 12:14 pm
  • Eduard Dimitrov

    Thanks for this feature. Now all users can see that MajesticSeo is number one backlink tool.

    June 25, 2013 at 1:44 pm
  • Eduardo Sainz

    Thanks for the tool, it’s a great way to review backlinks, very easy to use, good quality of information and very useful reports!

    Regards!

    June 25, 2013 at 7:22 pm
  • Jérôme

    A big thank you to France for this feature you offer us!
    Majestic is definitely the best tool online

    June 25, 2013 at 10:43 pm
  • Mariusz

    Thanks for the tool. I’m very happy so much.

    June 25, 2013 at 10:45 pm
  • Clinton

    Thanks so much for this. I really appreciate your generosity!

    June 25, 2013 at 11:03 pm
  • chokko

    This was a really good thing from Majestic, It’s a great tool,
    Thanks!

    June 26, 2013 at 12:43 am
  • carol manser

    You just made this blogger very happy! Thanks.

    June 26, 2013 at 1:56 am
    • cause

      i try majestic for one month then i upgrade for the silver pack i find it much more better than other Tools
      i like it then i share

      June 26, 2013 at 6:37 pm
  • Helen

    People love free things and I am not an exception.
    Thanks a lot Majestic!
    Regards,
    Helen

    June 26, 2013 at 7:37 am
  • FootyTube

    Nice seo tool from Majestic.

    June 26, 2013 at 11:28 am
  • Nader

    Wow. Excellent!

    This is the type of free stuff everyone could love.

    June 26, 2013 at 4:10 pm
  • Ed Seward

    It would be nicer if your beginning account was $25 per month instead of $50 per month.

    I had the silver account but my usage simply did not justify paying $50 a month. Had the price been $20 or $25 per month I would still be a paying user.

    June 26, 2013 at 5:49 pm
  • Michelangelo

    Complimenti a tutti voi! Questa una valida e seria soluzione per verificare l’attuale realtà del proprio sito internet. A mio avviso uno dei migliori servizi di grande serietà oggi esistenti.

    June 26, 2013 at 8:07 pm
  • Lyle Fredette

    Thank you. This is great news!

    June 26, 2013 at 10:31 pm
  • sensuallatex

    this is fantastic, good idea

    June 26, 2013 at 11:09 pm
  • john

    The free site explorer is more than what its worth for.

    June 26, 2013 at 11:38 pm
  • Jiri Ruzek

    Perfect, thank you for this awesome feature! 🙂

    June 27, 2013 at 11:18 am
  • Gabya

    Nice seo tool from Majestic.

    June 27, 2013 at 12:46 pm
  • Sujit Paul

    Excellent. Thank you very much for adding this free feature. Cheers!

    June 27, 2013 at 2:41 pm
  • Kristiyan Katsarov

    Awesome new future! Going to use this a lot! Thank you!

    July 5, 2013 at 11:13 pm
  • JeRust

    I have a question, since I just recently started using Majestic SEO, my concern is about the usage allowance of a Free Account. If Silver accounts are allowed to have 60 detailed reports per month, then what is the limitation for Free users? Also, Free accounts are also capable of creating standard and advance reports, however are these files downloadable in CSV format, or just viewable through their browser? I was able to download the CSV of my site’s backlinks, however it was limited to about 2500 URLs. That much wouldn’t be enough to see thousands of dead links hidden from those 2500+ URLs, but that’s not my primary concern. Can you give a quick explanation about the usage allowance and limitations of a Free user with regards to creating reports.
    Thanks in advance, gladly appreciate every response.

    July 30, 2013 at 4:07 am
    • Dixon Jones

      Free users get all the information on site they own and can verify. Paid users get data for ANY site.

      Site Explorer use is not part of the 60 reports a month – you can use it all the time within reason – but as you saw it is limited to 2500 links. Advanced reports (of which you can do 60 a month on silver, or your own sites for free) give you all the links. The limit over the month on silver is downloading 5 million links on silver (No limit on sites you own) and yes – you can export them all from an advanced report.

      July 30, 2013 at 12:52 pm

Comments are closed.