Knowing who the top back links, New back links and Lost lack links to your site is incredibly valuable.
Some back links are more influential than others and add more value to your link building efforts. Google use metrics to rank how influential sites are and how much they affect your search rankings. At Majestic we have our own Flow metrics, Citation and Trust Flow, which map the flow of links, giving you an insight into how influential a site is. The back links tab uses these metrics which we believe are the most informative in the industry, to order the links to the site.
This tab can help you to maintain your most valuable relationships, as by being aware of what your most influential back links are you can concentrate on ensuring that you keep these links, as well as giving you the knowledge of which type of links that you should focus on developing more of.
What is it?
The back links tab in Site Explorer shows the back links to your site in order of Citation and Trust flow, and therefore importance. It shows the Citation and Trust flow of the back link at URL and domain level, the source URL of the back link, the Anchor Text that was used and the page that they linked to. Information on when the link was first indexed, last seen and date lost (if applicable) is shown. Also flags to explain the type of link such as image, no follow, redirect, frame or deleted are shown. All of these back links you can download in CSV format to analysis further.
The back links tab also makes looking at the individual back links very easy and allows you to view the URL, create a report, view the back link in Site Explorer, add the link to your bucket list and compare anchor text with the keyword tool, all from this page.
New (Links)
What insights does this give me?
Knowing how people are linking to websites in your vertical on a daily basis is one of the most powerful ways that Majestic can keep you ahead of the competition, as you can gain information on what is the best time of day for developing links, what type of back links that your site gets, as well as the type of site these links are coming from. If you see a story taking off before your competitors realise, you can react faster, develop more relevant content and build more relevant partnerships with sites prone to linking. The New Links tab is your telescopic lens on what is happening to you and your competitors right now.
What is it?
The new link tab shows the new links your site has established. The links are shown in an interactive bar graph, where you can select a date range of up to 2 weeks to see date for. You are also shown summary information of a day when you hover over the graph. Underneath the graph is a breakdown of these links, the URL the Anchor Text used, the target page, the Citation and Trust flow at URL and domain level.
To select a date range on the graph, click on the start of the date range that you want to look at on the graph and drag it to the end of the range you want to see. The page will then refresh showing data for the range that you selected.
Lost (Links)
What insights does this give me?
Anyone can lose links. Having a healthy link profile is not just about establishing new back links but also maintaining the current ones. Links can be lost for a number of different reasons, such as they have been deleted by accident, they have been redirected elsewhere or they have been deleted on purpose. A lost link indicates a lost relationship. The Lost Links Tab offers more than helping you to maintain your own relationships by looking at the lost backlinks of competitors; it presents the opportunity to develop your own relationship with a site after their relationship is lost. This tab is a great way to see where you may be going wrong with your link building and can help you focus on the more important areas.
What is it?
The Lost links tab is similar to the new links tab except that it shows links that have been lost. It also enables you to select a date range of up to 2 weeks like the new link tab. The table shows when the link was first indexed, when it was last seen by our crawler and the date that we found the link was lost. This gives an indicative life span of the link. The backlinks are also ordered by Citation and Trust flow (after date) so are show in order of importance.
Editor note: This post was was originally drafted by Chloe, but was held back (and is published now) with respect to her and her family.
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Hi, lately, I’ve noticed a bunch of “lost” links, that when I go to check them are still there, so they are only lost to Majestic SEO.
April 30, 2013 at 3:56 pmHi,
We can only show what our crawlers saw at the time when they fetched the page. In a large scale crawl errors such as timeouts/DNS are possible and we err on a side of caution to keep cleaner data. Even with 99.9% uptime websites can be down for nearly 9 hours a year, since we crawl 24/7 chances of us catching sites in such conditions can be higher than when checking occasionally.
So we mark backlink as deleted in such cases in the interest of keeping cleaner data and can only apologise for cases of false positives that you may encounter. When we recrawl page and see link is still live then we’d remove deleted flag from it.
Alex
April 30, 2013 at 4:19 pmHi Carrie. Alex is certainly right on this one. There is no practical other way to handle pages that are unable to load.
April 30, 2013 at 5:04 pmI’m new to MajesticSEO, so this blog was very helpful to me. Two main questions: 1) Do links only become lost when they are deleted or redirected? (Would lost links also include pages that have become old or are no longer being indexed?) 2) When you say that some times of the day are better than others for developing links – does this apply only to news type websites where being among the first to get out news matters?
May 1, 2013 at 4:58 pmHi Lee,
May 1, 2013 at 5:40 pmThere are many reasons why a link disappears. Old or rare links would not disappear as long as we have actually crawled that page, but many URLs have changing content (such as the home page of a WordPress site and indeed any saying ?page1 for example. Also – there are many reasons why a URL cannot be crawled when we revisit it and they are not ALWAYS because the links has permanently gone. it may be due to a temporary outage on a server or a very slow to load page for example. In these cases, we will reinstate the link when we reconfirm it – but if it has disappeared for whatever reason when we recrawl it, then we record it as a lousy link until proven otherwise. For question 2, you are asking something which does not have a universal answer. Sometimes yes… sometimes no is the best I can offer from Majestic’s point of view.
> Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions – this has been very helpful!
May 1, 2013 at 6:27 pm