Majestic has always been proud to be able to provide a Freemium service, so that smaller companies on the Internet can find their own backlink data from us for free. This is no small undertaking. For Majestic to be able to show the backlinks of every website in an instant, this is not a quick look up of some DNS system or a clever scraping of Google’s data… we really do need to have crawled the whole internet in advance of the person looking up a domain and then we need to have analysed the entire web to create Flow Metrics and insightful data.
In short, the hardware alone is now an enormous cost and contrary to popular belief, we are not a big funded company.
In order to continue to offer a valuable free service to the majority of our users, we have therefore decided to control the excesses of people that have taken our free data to the extreme by introducing the concept of an “active” verified domain. Majestic will therefore continue to allow you to verify domains on Majestic, but free users will only be able to see search explorer data on five of their verified domains at any one time. For the majority of people, this probably will not be an imposition, as these changes will only affect you if you are on a free account and have been over using resources; if you are on a paid plan this will not impact you. But some users verify hundreds or even thousands of domains with Majestic and these users will now have to decide whether our data is worth a modest monthly fee.
Use Site Explorer for data on your free verified domains
Advanced Reports are now a very old technology at Majestic. For some years the effort has gone into the Site Explorer, which most customers use — often not realising that the Advanced Reports even exist. Moving forward, free users will still be able to create “Tracking” Reports, but will simply use the Site Explorer to see their strongest backlinks, anchor text, topics , etc. To be honest — since Topical Trust Flow is not even in the Advanced Reports, this should not be an imposition, but it will mean that Majestic can free up huge amounts of storage for Advanced Reports that were created once and never used. If your sites have less than 5,000 referring domains (or you are happy with the top 5,000 referring domains), then really this is not any inconvenience at all. However, we do understand that some free users rely on the Advanced Reports to get a more comprehensive view on their verified domains — and in this case, upgrading to a Silver subscription would open up many more avenues to see a complete analysis of your sites.
What other limitations are coming down the pipe?
Free users will no longer have access to the Historic index which shows every link we’ve ever found. Free users will still be able to see the Fresh index which contains “CURRENT” link data AND the URLs we’ve found in the last 90 days, but not all the data we have crawled, ever. But unless you are really interested in seeing the trend and dead links that no longer exist, then using the Fresh index should suffice. This is important in part because novice Majestic users also get confused between the two data sets.
Free users will also be required to log in regularly, to retain their tracking reports. The majority of reports (even tracking reports) get set up and then never touched. This leaves us holding the cost of maintaining these reports for nobody’s benefit. Therefore – if a free user appears to go inactive, then the system will send out a few polite reminders but ultimately we will recover the disk space and save our CPUs from continually updating the reports.
Free users will also only be able to make limited changes each month to which verified domains are “active”. We have created a system where the fair usage can actually vary depending on external factors, so it is not possible to say exactly how many times you can make your domains active or inactive every day, but suffice to say it is not “hundreds”.
Is this just a way to force more money out of users?
Not at all. This is for us to make our systems more responsive, and will prevent our customers worrying about escalating costs of Majestic in the future. Keeping in mind that this change only affects a minority of power users using our free services.
Won’t people just set up lots of separate free accounts?
Probably some will, but doing this at scale violates 14.1(f) of our terms of service.
So apart from Majestic, who benefits from all this?
Our customers! Our customers do not have to worry about the escalating costs of Majestic servicing free accounts. They can also find the system more responsive as their usage is no longer competing with work that our computers have to do for often redundant processing of free data.
We hope that the majority of our customers — free and paid — see that allowing 5 active Majestic verified domains per free user is a fair balance. As always, we value your thoughts so if you are concerned with how this may impact you and any of these changes then by all means let us know via the “contact us” section of our website.
- Majestic Historic Index – normalising builds. - March 5, 2020
- Majestic Historic Index – Reflecting on 2019 & looking forward to 2020. - November 11, 2019
- Introducing Related Sites. Find similar websites using Majestic - October 25, 2019
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September 8, 2015 at 2:49 pmI cannot see your email address as having an account, paid or free, on the system – so it’s hard to say for sure whether you are unhappy as a heavy free user, happy as a paid user that knows their pricing won’t change or simply surprised. If you are unhappy because you are heavily using our data for free, then I am sorry that this is so. We still give more free data than any competitors and this allows us to continue to have the lowest subscription of any of the major link tool providers.
September 9, 2015 at 9:20 amThe first reply to your change of the Freemium policy is quite interesting. Peoples don’t realize that with enough constructive inputs these policies can be adjusted or reversed, too. If not to the full extent, so at least perhaps to a more common ground. I’m a PAID member as I value very much your service but even so, I can’t pay for every other nice service on the net and I do use other free services. For my investments however, I must prioritize. What I want as a paid member are continuously added tools, better reports and for sure, detailed tips and tutorials. I hope, that with your changed policies, you do address these points. As far as five certified domains for free members goes, I feel that should be increased to max 25 (keeping the new limitations on the number of reports and/or possible information depths levels). Anyway, ALL free members have to come up here with their own voices too. I’m not talking on their behalf 😉 Just want to get them to express at this place their feelings and requirements.
— Rainer
P.S. I’m NOT associated with MAJESTIC in any way.
September 9, 2015 at 12:27 pmWell, unfortunately this is a deal-breaker for me.
I was using Majestic to help me clean up my backlink profile from a negative SEO attack. Today I logged in to download my reports and found out I can no longer access them.
I was planning on upgrading my account to Silver as soon as I could afford to, but after this treatment I don’t see that happening.
We all know why you are -really- making this change Majestic.
Don’t be greedy.
September 10, 2015 at 5:53 pmHi Guy,
Obviously that is your perogative. Your point works both ways. If you are making a living out of the internet, then you should expect to pay your way. We think we are very inexpensive for the massive infrastructure required to do this. If, on the other hand, your blog or website is a bit of fun, then you still have plenty of access – more than any other link provider.
In any event, we hope to see you again one day.
September 11, 2015 at 7:33 amTo be honest, I think this change is not only reasonable, but much better than it could have been. Even with the change, your competitors still provide far less data. I’ve only been using it for a short while, but in that time I’ve enjoyed great data and fast customer service, so I’ll keep sticking around despite this change.
If you don’t mind a suggestion, and it actually goes against my nature suggesting it, but have you ever considered using ads to recover some of the costs?
For example allowing free users to continue running reports, but only so long as adblock is disabled, and if adblock is detected so many times repeatedly the services stop. I’m not actually a SEO expert or anything so I have nothing to base this one, but I think SEO companies would pay a lot to have an advert run before a user can see the results of a report (Like youtube adverts) because relevant adverts generate a much better click through rate. I personally would happily sit through any advert, so long as they don’t take the Michael (30minute long unskippable adverts for example), when I know I’d be getting a lot of data at the end of it.
September 15, 2015 at 12:18 pmhi, hmm that is an interesting suggestion. I will float it around internally for further consideration. Thank you for making the point.
September 15, 2015 at 1:55 pmI’m not a big friend of ads anywhere at all. Either you do provide a free service or you don’t. I did used ads on my sites for a short period in the past and I made a decent income, but ultimately, I threw away that idea. From my freeware, I got enough clients to support my operations, no ads where needed. In fact, I think I got more clients during the ‘no ads time’ than during the period when I used them. Ads are so destructive and I always leave a site quickly when ads are cluttered around. I am however for a reduced service for those who don’t pay even a small sum.
September 16, 2015 at 1:35 am— Rainer