UPDATE: Older First Indexed Dates in Fresh

Some of you may have noticed a wider range of Dates now in Fresh, such as the examples below with “First Indexed” dates in 2020.

This is a subtle change over previous behaviour which limited all dates to the corresponding crawl range of the index; around 4 months for Fresh and 5 and a half years for Historic.

Why the older “First Indexed” dates?

Until Recently, “First Indexed” dates were bound to the crawl range of the index in which they were found. A Fresh Index containing data gathered between 01 Feb 2021 to 02 Jun 2021 would not normally show dates outside of this range.

We have made “First Indexed” dates more sticky, so the “First Indexed” date can now reach outside the respective range of the Fresh Index. This can be seen above, where a link to https://www.eurovision.tv/page/home is has a first found date of 16th November 2020 – this is before the Fresh Index start date of 2nd Feb 2021. (Note, these dates are correct at the time of writing the article).

This project fits into our 2021 mission to ensure Majestic Backlink data is appropriate for a wide manner of uses by a range of data-savvy digital marketing professionals.

We hope that making “First Indexed” dates closer to “first discovered”, gives you richer data.

The Range of Fresh has not changed

Fresh still represents links checked within the last 4 months. If you need more accuracy, removing links marked as deleted will focus in on only links found in the last 4 months which were live last time we checked.

This behaviour is unchanged.

All we have done is to turn on behaviour that makes the First Indexed dates more sticky for many of the links in Fresh Indexed.

Warning! Subtleties

This release marks a step towards better date resolution. We have aimed to have good stickiness for “First Indexed” dates in Fresh, especially across more popular URLs. This behaviour works best when URLs are crawled frequently within the date range of Fresh Index.

The web is a big place, and we don’t rescan every URL within the window of the Fresh Index. Therefore, there maybe some URLs which still forget their First Indexed date.

We do want to keep working on this. We see better dates in the index as a key part of our 2021 Backlink Fidelity project announced earlier this year.

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