#wow its been almost three years since i posted my legacy challenge

[candlesundae]

*knock knock* Hello? It’s been a while my dudes. How’ve you all been?

[lucywithlupus]

Top 4 Bad & Good Things about my Body/ Top 4 Cosas Malas & Buenas de mi Cuerpo

Let's get real: arthritis sucks. It sucks incredibly hard. It sucks so bad not even all of the straws in this planet (serious issue) could suck as terribly as receiving the sad news that you suffer from a rheumatic condition.     And because this condition is that terrible, it can lead your mind, heart, and soul to constantly attack your body with negative feelings, perceptions, and emotions. It is like your mind cannot stop concentrating about how not good your body is, how it fails to do the smallest things, or how it is not doing the things you ask it to do.    The Mental Health Surveys published in 2008 their results on mental disorders among persons with arthritis. With a sample of 10 641 adults (wow!), with 78% response rate in an audience with 23% reporting at least one medical disorder in the past 12 months, they clearly showed that these disorders and mental illnesses go hand in hand. About 35% of people with a mental health disorder did seek treatment, while more than half did not even consider the idea.    These were their conclusions:

"The high rate of not consulting among those with disability and comorbidity is an important public health problem. As Australia has a universal health insurance scheme, the barriers to effective care must be patient knowledge and physician competence."    Aka there is a LOT of work to do. A lot.        Another study by SAGE Journals said first what was said by The Mental Health Surveys in 2005, only focusing on rheumatoid arthritis (RA) About 150 participants, with varying duration of time since diagnosed, and the results were the following:         1. Perceiving illness as that something closest to you worsened depression and overall quality of life.     2. Remaining calm actually worked on those recently diagnosed:

"Optimism related to lower pain in early and intermediate RA. Social support related to lower fatigue in established RA. Indications for interventions targeted by disease duration are discussed."    Sometimes, when the years go by and your good ol' pal arthritis has been sitting in your couch for way too long, it can really get heavy on your shoulders. So much to do, so many things to see and experience, only to be dragged down by your frenemy right there *aggressively stares at chair*.    But it does not have to be this complicated. Your body and your mind are one and the same, they do not have to hate each other, or disconnect from one another in a way that actually will strip away all control from your hands. Your mind and body should not have fights every two seconds, they are both just trying their damn hardest to get by, and you know that. I know that. Your loved ones know that.    So let's do it for them, for you and me, but most importantly, you.    Without further ado, here we go! Top 4 Bad and Good Things about my Body with Arthritis.    

   Bad Thing 1: My body is weak

This used to be my mantra for six years of my life. I used to play this on repeat in my head like the hottest new summer mixtape. I already had enough with high school, trying to get unimaginable perfect grades and carrying the burden of being told every day that I was Einstein or something and I could achieve those grades if I wanted to.

The problem is that I wanted to, but know I know I never did. Does that make sense?

Let's be real. What kid likes to be sat down, all day, staring at colorful post its and trying to remember those English quotes for a massive surprise essay next week? No one! Not even me now, even though I am an adult. Kinda.

I just dreamed of getting to university, the days of the present shifting by while I had my eyes on the prize. At least I managed to get a spot on a university I love and enjoy with all my heart.

But even at arrival, I felt weak. Felt weak that I could not sit in my lecture hall comfortably for an hour. Felt weak because I had to take a nap in the afternoon after a three-hour lab. Felt weak because I could not finish that deadline because my knees hurt way too much to sit down and type away.

Feeling weak is normal, but we need to know that we cannot do everything. Nothing in life is free, but also it does not mean we do not take a break every now and then to make sure our body is taken care of. You cannot achieve what you want without rest. Your body will blow up! Poof!

Do not do that to yourself. Please.

Good Thing 1: My body is strong

Think of the strongest person you know. It's probably its Dwayne the Rock Johnson so let's stick with him.

Dwayne is a huge person. His arms are probably bigger than my ribcage, and his ribcage is probably bigger than my entire body. He trains a lot, eats more than that and is always ready to sing in the next Disney Movie, kick butt in the next action feature or yell in Moati dancing with a bunch of ten-year-old football players (pls do google this. It is hilarious.)

His life is pretty incredible, but that does not mean he did not have his up and downs. His childhood was pretty intense, as he was a major athlete and had to keep up with the legacy of wrestling legends established by his grandfather.

But this 101 on Dwayne's life isn't about him, it's about you! Look at you! You are the Rock too!

You managed to be told you have a condition that may probably never leave you and you successfully did not attempt to quit your life. You basically babysit your body all day, every day, trying to give it what it needs and avoid what it does not. You made and will make sacrifices to make sure you and those with you are ok, under any circumstance.

We get up every morning, in stinging pain, attempting to fling our bodies out of bed and waddle to the bathroom, take a shower, change clothes, brush our teeth, stuff our aching feet into some shoes and get out that door because we know we would go mad if we did not fight this every day. We know that if we did not go through that hassle every day and showed arthritis who's boss, our minds would collapse, we would lose the fight.

So keep fighting.

Bad Thing 2: My body is weird

Needless to say, a typical human body does not wreck itself everytime it goes up the stairs (remember kids: the first step is always the hardest). It is simply not the way it was designed to function, simple biology. Now, that does not mean your body is plain vanilla, but it also does not mean your body is an abomination like the ones in horror movies- or the ones who barely make it through horror movies.

My body is not weird. Period. I already spoke about how people are so legitimately shocked that I can properly function like the productive adult that I am, let alone those who just disapprove of me being me in public. Well, too bad Susan, I am here and so is my medical condition! I can't press the off button today thank you very much.

Your body can do so many amazing things. It can take care of itself and others. It can stump to the places you need to be in, or walk in good days, or run in the best days. It can do so many wonderful things, but you have to stop telling yourself that you are the odd one out. Anyone with a slight glimpse of intelligence will not care that you have to take your pills at this exact time, or that you have to sit down and rest for a while.

Keep those people close, but your enemies closer. No enemies, but confused strangers. Teach them about your condition, educate the public on what it is and how they can actually help us get by (aka this blog!).

Good Thing 2: My body is interesting

Maybe its because I am studying for a degree in science, but natural curiosity is never as bad as some people may think. Your body actually is fascinating to many doctors and field experts out there! The way it behaves and its mysterious ways are like an elegant puzzle, an enigma for them to observe and somehow complete.

Now, don't sell yourself to science, unless you really want to. Find money elsewhere.

I was always questioning why my body behaved this way until I realized the way I felt, when I felt it and how I felt it was pretty consistent, almost clock-like. The way our body operates is highly interesting, investigating on the subject won't blow your mind, but it may lead you to ask a question or two as to why your body is doing this to itself.

Maybe googling or reading a few articles some things will help you share your journey with others. Soon I will teach you the best ways to research for your own condition in a new post!

Just close your eyes for a moment, and focus on every single part of your body, one by one. Think about one good thing they did today: your feet took you to have breakfast, your hands held your favorite book, your eyes watched a beautiful movie today, your mouth helped you eat lunch, etc.

Any insignificant action that your body does is amazing and should be celebrated. Treat yourself for that!

Bad Thing 3: My body is ugly

Ugly duckling never felt so ugly. Now she did not only had to worry about her thick legs that could not fit inside those terribly small skinny jeans or that small bump in her stomach where, surprise surprise, but organs are also supposed to be in. Suddenly, what little body confidence she had taken a whole new spin: her body was now also not cute in other ways. Like abnormally inflated joints, finger stuck in a claw-like fashion, or the constant weight gain and loss I had during my experience with arthritis due to the lack of exercise.

Arthritis and other rheumatic conditions make yourself feel terrible about your appearance. Taking care of your looks sometimes is not a priority anymore. It can even be a challenge: you have to pick outfits, wear uncomfortable shoes, not have enough space in your purse or pockets (women pockets are the worst!period!) to carry your medicine around. Makeup can sometimes even be harsh on your skin when you get redness, or your hair may fall out because of the medication.

Let's not talk about shaving. Avoid for our own good.  

But everyone deserves to feel cute, at least once in a while. Now I really don't care what they tell me: I can look a mess but feel beautiful, every single day. Because my body is my home, it takes care of me, and I take care of it. It deserves pampering and I will provide it every now and then.

Good Thing 3: My body is beautiful

Now, let's repeat the exercise we just did, now open your eyes. Look at yourself in the mirror, take in all that you are, every curve, every little detail, and imperfection. Say one nice thing about it all. Look at those eyes! Look at that hair! So stylish! Look at those shoulders! So strong! And so on.

No one's body is perfect, and trying it to make it magazine ready all day is not worth it. But please have the chance to try new things, look for new clothes (or used ones) that make you feel good, beautiful and confident all day!

So if you see a cute dress that you like and you can afford it, go for it! You will slay whatever place you will wear it to. Did you saw a nice shirt on sale? Buy it! You will look so cool, so fly.

Hint: there will also be a new post coming about tips and tricks on how to buy and wear clothes when you have arthritis. Struggling with that zipper every morning is a major problem! Stop!

Bad Thing 4: My body will never heal

   As already discussed, no one really knows why arthritis is a thing, and thus, no one knows how it leaves and why. Maybe it has to do with stress. Perhaps it has something to do with environmental conditions or lifestyle. Who knows.

But that does not mean you lose hope that easily. Sure, some of us have had our condition for five, ten, even thirty years, and it still there. But arthritis' place in our bodies is not permanent, I swear on Yuval Harari (aka one of my favorite authors of all time).

You can bet all you want that when you least expect it, this uninvited acquaintance will be poofed off, and free you shall be at last. Just make sure you are working for it: be kind to yourself, take your meds, eat healthy (at least try), do some exercise, educate yourself and others, help out those in need, etc.

Good Thing 4: My body will get better

It will, and it is. Yas.

I sometimes I feel challenged to balance my priorities and make sure I am not overworking myself when trying to get better. The irony of it all: we sometimes work too hard in trying to get better sometimes. We read a lot, research to no end. We try so many different diets, hoping one will be the one to cure us at last, we go to so many different treatments, yoga sessions, detox classes, and God knows what more.

Being excited about staying healthy is important, a good solid start. But do not go crazy trying to find a cure that may not even be accessible to you at stores or detox juices. Instead, trust your body. It knows what it's doing, most of the time. It will heal itself in the only way it knows how to: eating, sleeping, resting, drinking water,  and asking for stuff. Lots of stuff. Another hint: new post on how to make a survival kit soon!

Getting better can sometimes feel like a rollercoaster: sometimes we are up, sometimes we fall head first 20 feet up in the air towards the solid ground. Gravity is harsh, man.

But you know what I a trying to say. Things will not always be easy, and sometimes you will not be able to control everything or know what to do. That's why you have to ask for help. From your parents, your caretakes, your doctors and your friends. Build a support circle around you so you always know someone always has your back, sometimes literally.

Arthritis is no piece of cake, and other rheumatic disorders are not either. They are tasks for us to fulfill, but we are not bad. We are not sick. We are not ugly. And we definitely are not going to sit here and take it. Because we have enough things to worry about, and we could not care less about what you or others have to say about our progress. We know our worth, we appreciate ourselves and celebrate our bodies in the best way we can: by treating it right, with respect, dignity, love, and courage.

Love you so you can love. See you around!

Also, I would love to share with your guys this lovely group of families in Kampala with children with disabilities at Ndagire Ritah @ritandagire76 on Instagram. Please copy and paste their username and say hi! Drop a donation if you can! It's for a great cause!

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Seamos sinceros: la artritis apesta. Increíblemente. Es tan mala que ni siquiera todas las cañitas del mundo (problema bastante serio) no podrían igualarse a recibir la triste noticia de que tu sufres de artritis reumatoide.

Y por que esta condición es tan horrible, puede convencer a tu mente, corazón y espíritu de atacar a tu cuerpo con pensamientos negativos, percepciones falsas y emociones dañinas. Es como si tu mente no puede dejar de concentrarse en todo lo malo que tu cuerpo es, todas las fallas que comete, incluso en las quehaceres más pequeños, o cómo no está logrando las cosas que tu le pides que haga.The Mental Health Surveys publicó en el 2008 sus resultados en la relación que existe entre las enfermedades mentales y la artritis. Con 10 641 sujetos adultos puestos a prueba (wow!) y una tasa de respuesta del 78%, el estudio involucró casi 2,500 personas discapacitadas. Los resultados demostraron que los desórdenes reumatológicos y las enfermedades mentales van de mano en mano. Casi 35% de las personas que padecían de una enfermedad mental buscaron tratamientos, mientras que más de la mitas ni siquiera consideró la idea de hacerlo.

Y estas fueron sus conclusiones:  

" El alto índice de falta de tratamiento mental en aquellos que sufren de discapacidad y comorbilidad es un problema de salud pública. Ya que Australia tiene un esquema universal de seguros médicos, las barreras que previenen cuidado efectivo deben ser el conocimiento del paciente acerca de posibles tratamientos y la competencia del médico tratante."

En otras palabras, hay mucho que hacer. MUCHO. Demasiado.

Otro estudio por SAGE journals anticipó en 2005 lo dicho por The Mental Health Surveys, solo enfocándose en la artritis reumatoide (RA). Casi 150 participantes, quienes padecían de artritis por variadas duraciones de tiempo. Los resultados fueron los siguientes.

Percibir la enfermedad como lo más cercano a tu ser puede empeorar la depresión y calidad de vida.

Conservar la calma tuvo, en efecto, un resultado positivo en aquellos que acababan de ser diagnosticados.

"El optimismo mejoró el dolor secundario  en artritis reumatoide de duración temprana y intermedia. Indicaciones de intervenciones dirigidas a la duración de la enfermedad fueron discutidas."

A veces, cuando los años pasan y tu vieja amiga artritis estuvo sentada en tu sillón por mucho tiempo, en serio puede convertirse en una carga pesada. Tanto que hacer, tantas cosas que ver y experimentar, solo para ser empujada por tu amiga-enemiga, que siempre está justo ahí *miro mi silla*

Pero no tiene que ser tan complicado. Tu cuerpo y tu mente son tal para cual, fulano y mengano no tienen que odiarse, o desconectarse de una manera que quitaría todo el control de tus manos. Tu mente y cuerpo no deberían pelear cada dos segundos, solo están tratando de conseguir el mismo objetivo: trabajar super duro para sobrevivir, y eso ya lo sabías. Yo lo sabía. Tus seres queridos también lo sabían.Así que hagámoslo por ellos, por tu y yo. Pero sobre todo, hazlo por ti.Ahora sin más preámbulos, aquí vamos! Top 4 Cosas Malas y Buenas de Mi Cuerpo.   Cosa Mala 1: Mi cuerpo es débil

Este solía ser mi mantra por seis años de mi vida. Solía repetir esto en mi cabeza como esas canciones pop que salen en verano. Ya tenía suficientes líos con la secundaria, tratando de sacar notas inimaginables y perfectas y cargar la responsabilidad de ser vista como Einstein o algo por el estilo. Todo el mundo me decía que yo podía sacar la nota que quisiera sin esfuerzo alguno.

El problema es que yo sí mi esforzaba, pero nunca quise hacerlo. Se entiende?

Seamos honestos con nosotros mismos. A qué niño le gusta estar sentado todo el dia, mirando post its de colores con datos para el siguiente ensayo sorpresa de Inglés la próxima semana? Ninguno! Ni siquiera yo ahora quiero hacer eso, incluso si soy una adulta. Casi.

Yo solo soñaba con entrar a la universidad, los días del presente un abrir y cerrar de ojos mientras yo tenía la mirada fija en la línea de llegada. Al menos logre un lugar en una universidad que yo a mi y disfruto con todo mi corazón.

Pero incluso al llegar, me sentía débil. Débil porque no podía sentarme en mi salón de audiencias cómodamente por más de una hora. Débil porque debía tomar una siesta en la tarde después de un laboratorio de tres horas. Débil porque no podía entregar el trabajo por que mis rodillas me dolían demasiado para sentarme en mi escritorio y prender mi computadora.   No te hagas eso a ti mismo. Por favor.

Cosa Buena 1: Mi cuerpo es fuerte

Piensa en la persona más fuerte que conoces. Probablemente es Dwayne the Rock Johnson así que utilicemoslo de ejemplo.

Dwayne es una persona enorme. Sus brazos son probablemente más grandes que mi pecho, y su pecho es probablemente más grande que mi cuerpo. El entrena un montón, come más que eso y siempre está listo para cantar en la siguiente película de Disney, pegarle a alguien en el siguiente blockbuster de acción o gritar en un baile Haka junto a grupo de niñas de diez años en un partido de football (por favor busquen eso. Es divertidisimo.)

Su vida es muy increíble, pero eso no significa que no tenga sus altibajos. Su infancia fue bastante intensa, pues esa un atleta profesional desde muy chico y siempre trató de mantener el legado de leyendas boxeadoras establecido por su abuelo.

Pero este 101 en la vida de Dwayne no se trata de él. Se trata de ti! Mírate! Tú también eres como La Roca!Tu lograste soportar que te dijeran que tienes una condición que quizá nunca te abandone y victoriosamente no tratarse de terminar tu vida. Tu básicamente de cuidas cual bebé todo el dia, todos los días, esforzándote para darle a tu cuerpo lo que necesita y evitar lo que no necesita. Tu haces y harás los sacrificios necesarios para asegurarte que tu y los que amas están seguros, bajo cualquier circunstancia.

Nos levantamos cada mañana, en dolor agudo, tratando de aventar nuestros cuerpos fuera de la cama y cojear hasta el baño, ducharse, cambiarse de ropa, lavarse los dientes, encajar nuestros pies dolidos en un par de zapatillas y salir por esa puerta por que sabemos que perderíamos la cabeza si no luchamos esta condición todos los días. Sabemos claramente que si no nos tomáramos la molestia de hacer todo eso en la mañana y no le mostráramos a la artritis quien manda, nuestras mentes colapsaría y perderíamos la batalla.Así que sigue luchando.

Cosa Mala 2: Mi cuerpo es raro

No hace falta decir que el típico cuerpo humano usualmente no se destruye a sí mismo cada vez que tratas de subir las escaleras (recuerden amigos: el primer paso siempre es el más difícil). Tu cuerpo simplemente no está diseñado para funcionar de esa manera, biología básica. Ahora, eso no significa que tu cuerpo sea tan básico como el pan blanco, pero tampoco significa que tu cuerpo es una abominación como las que salen en las películas de horror- o los que a las re justas sobreviven la película.

Mi cuerpo no es raro. Punto. Ya hablé de las personas que siempre se encuentran tan sorprendidas que yo puedo funcionar como la mujer productiva que soy, y también de aquellos que me miran con desaprobación en público. Bueno, que pena Susan, estoy aquí y también lo está mi condición médica! No pude apretar el botón de apagado hoy, muchas gracias.

Tu cuerpo puede hacer tantas cosas maravillosas. Puede cuidarse y a otros. Puede lentamente dirigirse a los lugares en los que tu debes estar, o caminar hacia ellos en los días buenos, o correr incluso en los días súper buenos. Puede hacer tantas cosas maravillosas, pero tienes que dejar de nombrarte a ti mismo la oveja negra. Cualquiera con poco de inteligencia no le importará que tienes que tomar tus pastillas a esta hora exacta, o que tienes que sentarse un rato de descansar.

Ten a tus amigos cerca, pero a tu enemigos más cerca. No enemigos, pero extraños confundidos. Enséñales a cerca de tu condición, educa al público de qué es la artritis y cómo nos pueden ayudar en el dia a dia (o sea, este blog!).

Cosa Buena 2: Mi cuerpo es interesante

Quizá es porque estoy estudiando para un bachiller de ciencia, pero la curiosidad nunca es tan mala como algunos creen. Tu cuerpo es en realidad fascinante para varios doctores y expertos de la medicina! La manera en que se comporta y sus muchos misterios son como un elegante rompecabezas, un enigma para que ellos observen y resuelvan.

Ahora, no te vendas a la ciencia, a menos que en serio lo desees. Encuentra dinero en otro sitio.Siempre me cuestionaba por que mi cuerpo se comportaba de este modo hasta que me di cuenta que lo que sentía, cómo lo sentía y cuando tenía constancia, casi de reloj. La manera en que tu cuerpo se opera a sí mismo es altamente interesante, investigar en el asunto no reventara su cerebro, pero te puede llevar a preguntarte algo o más acerca de tu cuerpo y de porqué hace lo que hace.

Quizá googlear o leer unos cuantos artículos de esto te ayudará en tu viaje con los demás. Pronto les enseñaré las mejores técnicas para investigar tu condición en un nuevo post!

Solo cierra tus ojos por un momentos y enfócate en cada parte de tu cuerpo, una por una. Piensa en algo bueno que todos ellos hicieron hoy: tus pies de llevaron a tomar desayuno en la mañana, tu manos sostuvieron tu libro favorito, tus ojos miraron una buena película, tu boca te ayudo a comer tu almuerzo, etc.Cada acción que parezca insignificante es increíble y debería celebrarse. Quiérete por eso!

Cosa Mala 3: Mi cuerpo es feo

El patito feo nunca se sintió tan feo. Ahora no solo tenía que lidiar con sus piernas gruesas que no entraban en esos horribles pantalones entallados, o el pequeño bulto que sobresale de su estómago donde, sorpresa, hay órganos importantes ahí! De repente, su baja confianza en sí misma también tomó un giro de 360 grados, pues regreso al mismo lugar, solo que en una perspectiva distinta. Su cuerpo ahora tenía otras razones por las cuales no era lindo, como las articulaciones anormalmente inflamadas, los dedos atorados como garras, o la constante sube y baja de peso que pasó por la falta de ejercicio.

La artritis y otras condiciones reumáticas a veces te hacen sentir terrible a cerca de tu apariencia. Cuidarla a veces ya no es una prioridad, o incluso puede ser desafiante. Tienes que elegir atuendos, usar zapatos incómodos, o no tener suficiente espacio en tu bolso o bolsillos (lo dire: los bolsillos de mujer son horribles!) para cargar tu medicina alrededor. El maquillaje también puede ser dañino para tu piel enrojecida por la inflamación, o tu cabello se podría caer por la medicina que tomes.

Y no hablemos de la rasuradora. Evitemoslo por nuestro propio bien.

Pero todos merecemos sentirnos lindos, al menos de vez en cuando. Ahora no me importa que me digan: puedo parecer un desastre pero de todas maneras me sentiré hermosa, todos los días. Porque mi cuerpo es mi casa, me cuida y yo lo cuido. Merece consentimientos y los proveeré de vez en cuando.

Cosa Buena 3: Mi cuerpo es hermoso

Ahora repitamos el ejercicio que acabamos de hacer, ahora abre tus ojos. Mirate al espejo, observa todo lo que eres, cada curva y cada detalle y imperfección. Di una cosa buena acerca de cada cosa. Mira esos ojos! Mira este peinado! Qué estilo! Mira esos hombros! Que fuerte! Y sigue asi.

El cuerpo de nadie es perfecto, y tratar de lucir listo para la portada de una revista todos los días no vale la pena. Pero por favor ten la oportunidad de probar cosas nuevas (o usadas) que te hagan sentir bien, lindo y con confianza todo el dia!

Así que si ves un vestido lindo que te gusta y lo puedes pagar, hazlo! Serás despampanante a donde vayas. Viste una camisa que te gusta y está a la venta? Consíguela! Te verás genial, tan cool.Pista: habrá un nuevo post acerca de tips de cómo encontrar y usar ropa adecuada para personas con artritis. Luchando con ese cierre cada mañana es un problema mayor! Detente!

Cosa Mala 4: Mi cuerpo no se va a curar

Como ya lo discute, nadie sabe por qué la artritis existe, y debido a eso, nadie sabe cómo se va y porqué. Quizá tenga que ver con el estrés. Quizá tenga algo que ver con las condiciones medioambientales o el estilo de vida. Quien sabe.

Pero eso no significa que debes perder la esperanza tan fácilmente. Si, algunos de nosotros han tenido esta condición por cinco, diez, quizá hasta treinta años, y sigue ahí. Pero el lugar de la artritis en nuestros cuerpos no es permanente, lo juro por Yuval Harari (uno de mis autores favoritos de todos los tiempos).

Puedes apostar todo lo que quieras que cuando menos te des cuenta, esta conocida sin invitación se desvanecerá, y tu serás libre al fin. Solo asegúrate de hacer tu trabajo y ser amable contigo mismo, tomar tus medicinas, comer saludablemente (al menos trata), haz algo de ejercicio, educate y a otros, ayuda a los que lo necesitan, etc.

Cosa Buena 4: Mi cuerpo se va a mejorar

Lo hará y lo está haciendo. Yas.

Yo a veces me siento abrumada por el balance que debo poner en mis prioridades y asegurarse de no sobre trabajar cuando me estoy mejorando de una crisis. La ironía: a veces trabajamos demasiado en mejorarnos. Leemos demasiado, investigando sin fin. Tratamos tantas dietas diferentes y jugos detox, esperando que uno sea la llave maestra de la artritis. Vamos a tantas cursos de yoga, tratamientos naturistas y muchas otras cosas más.

Estar emocionado de estar saludable es importante, es un buen comienzo. Pero no te aloques tratando de encontrar una cura que quizá ni siquiera puedas comprar o poner en un jugo detox. En vez de eso, confía en tu cuerpo. Sabe lo que hace, la mayoría del tiempo. Se sanará a sí mismo de la única manera que sabe cómo: comiendo, durmiendo, tomando agua, descansando y pidiendo cosas. Muchas cosas. Ya viene el siguiente post de cómo alistar un kit anti-artritis.

Mejorarse a veces parece una montaña rusa: a veces subimos, a veces caemos en picada de 20 metros en el cielo hacia el duro suelo. La gravedad es dura.Pero sabes lo que trato de decir. Las cosas a veces no son fáciles, y a veces no podemos controlar todo o saber qué hacer en ciertas situaciones. Por eso debes pedir ayudar. De tus padres o cuidadores, de tu doctor y de tus amigos. Construye un círculo protector alrededor tuyo para que siempre tengas a alguien sosteniendo tu espalda- a veces literalmente.

La artritis no es una caminata en el parque, pero otras condiciones reumáticas tampoco lo son. Son trabajos de tiempo completo que debemos realizar, pero no somos malos. No estamos enfermos. No somos débiles, feos, raros. Y definitivamente no vamos a sentarnos y escucharte decirnos eso. Porque tenemos cosas más importantes que hacer, y no nos podría importar menos lo que otros tengan que decir al respecto, o que digan de nuestro progreso. Sabemos lo que valemos y celebramos nuestros cuerpos en la mejor manera posible: tratándolo bien, con respeto, dignidad, amor y coraje.

Ama para que puedas amar. Nos vemos!

También me encantaría compartir con ustedes este grupo de familias en Kampala con niños con discapacidades en Ndagire Ritah @ritandagire76 en Instagram. Por favor copien y peguen su username y digan hola! Donen si pueden! Es por una buena causa!

[gascon-en-exil]

A Not Actually Definitive Ranking of Fire Emblem Games

So after a lot of deliberation I’ve decided not to revisit last year’s Zelda ranking project on a full scale for FE, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something I really wanted to do. 2018 is the year we’re going to get alternatively hyped for and disappointed by FE16, after all. With that in mind have an abbreviated list that will end up being one very long post. I’ve got games to gush over and an anon or two (and very likely actual followers…eep) to piss off, so here we go.

The “personal favorites of the series, love revisiting them” Tier - FE10, FE2/15, FE4

I’m never going to argue that Radiant Dawn is a perfect game or even just a perfect FE game, but damned if it doesn’t manage to do so much right all at once. An extremely ambitious story that builds off its mostly conventional predecessor in a variety of interesting ways, deconstructing a bunch of series narrative standards (life in a defeated country kind of sucks and there are people that don’t warm that quickly to young and inexperienced rulers, go figure) and taking an eleventh hour hard right at Nietzchean atheism as read by a Pride parade. Kind of falls on its ass by the end, but every experimental FE story does the same thing so I can’t fault this one. I love the army switching as motivation to try different units almost as much as I love the oh-so-exploitable growth and BEXP mechanics. Its Easy mode also hits a sweet spot for me of being challenging enough to not be a complete snore while also allowing the freedom for all manner of weird self-imposed challenges that don’t even require grinding. By all accounts Hard mode is one lazy design choice after another, but I don’t play at that level so no complaints here.

Never played Gaiden, but to its credit around half of the unique gameplay mechanics I like in Shadows of Valentia were also in the original: the modest army size, the novel approaches to inventory management and magic, the pretty basic class system with just a hint of nuance. The remake threw in some hit-or-miss questing, dungeon exploration, and achievements, but all the rest was either a solid addition or a continuation of NES-era annoyances that I could live with. And the story…SoV makes me dislike the DS games even more just because this game does so much with so little. Even leaving aside the mostly great voice acting there’s a bunch of new content that characterizes almost everybody and makes half of them (the men, anyway, because this is a remake of a Kaga-era game and therefore misogynistic as can be) gay because why the hell not, and then some development that constitutes the only solid attempt at worldbuilding Archanea-Valentia-Ylisse has ever really gotten and also retcons some stuff from Awakening into making sense. It’s even got some solid DLC with lots of character stuff for the Deliverance, the least sucky grinding of the 3DS games, and probably the only context in which I’ll ever be able to comment on anything from Cipher.

No remake needed for Genealogy of the Holy War to make it competitive with the rest of the top tier - just an excellent translation patch and the standard features of an emulator. I’ve never watched Game of Thrones and probably don’t plan on it, but I gather that this game provides the same essential experience with less blood and female nudity and marginally more egalitarianism for all. I can forgive it for being the original Het Baby Fest since you’d be hard-pressed to find a single entirely healthy and well-adjusted individual anywhere on Jugdral and I relate to that just as much. Screwed up family dynamics for everyone! It’s also arguably got a more fun breeding meta than either of the 3DS games, lacking Awakening’s optimization around a single postgame map with very specific parameters or Fates’s high level of balance that ironically stymies analysis. This is another game for interesting inventory management and unit leveling that isn’t too obnoxious, which mostly makes up for the maps taking an eon to play through even with an emulator speeding through those enemy phases. This would be a strange game to remake, but if it got a localized one of the same caliber as SoV I fully acknowledge that this could climb to the #2 spot. SoV would probably have the queer edge though unless they do some strange things to the plot or just make Gen 2 really gay…but then again Gen 2 is the part that’s more in need of fleshing out as it is. (Also, this game has So. Much. Incest. That’s not even really a kink of mine especially as it’s all straight incest, but I just find that hilarious in light of how Tumblr’s purity culture speaks of such things.)

The “good games, but don’t come back to them as much” Tier - FE7, FE9, FE8

Blazing Sword is not here for nostalgia purposes, especially since when I first played the game at 14 years old most of what I like about it didn’t really register. It was just that game with RPG elements that I liked and permadeath that I didn’t, and it took a few games after that for me to become an established fan of the franchise. Massive props for putting such an unconventional spin on a prequel to a textbook FE; this is a game in a series about war in which no war is fought, how crazy is that? We actually get to see the backstory of FE6′s tragic antagonist, even as it’s completely tangential to the plot of this game and so just feels like random Jugdral-esque family drama without context, and on top of that we get the first hints of interdimensional travel and kinky human/shapeshifter sex several years before either of those became controversial talking points about how they were ruining the series. I am so there. Lyn doesn’t matter to the saga, but her character arc is distinct and self-contained and also she picked up a disproportionately large fanbase while being bisexual and biracial so go her. Eliwood is sympathetic and homosocially-inclined even if his growths frequently make me want to cry (at least he gets a horse unlike his similarly-challenged son), and I can live with Hector even if I could have done without his lordly legacy. Throw in some average-for-the-time gameplay with just enough variety across the two routes and even more good character work *waves at Sonia and Renault and Priscilla -> Raven/Lucius and Serra and…* and it’s all in all a solid experience. The ranking system can go die in a fire though, which funnily enough it did after this game. Yay!

Like most early 3D games - except on Gamecube so it’s even more embarrassing - Path of Radiance has aged terribly by every aesthetic measure aside from the soundtrack. It’s also painfully slow, and my computer can’t run Dolphin apparently so an emulator’s not going to fix that for me. Those obvious flaws aside, it’s still an entertaining game, and more importantly it’s the prologue that had the crucial task of setting up all the pins RD knocked over in stellar fashion, whether we’re talking about the basic storyline that actually isn’t or the many het relationship fake-outs (more so in localization…I guess we’ll never know if NoA was actively planning that when they pushed Ike/Elincia like they did). PoR is also a love letter to Jugdral in both gameplay and themes, albeit an occasionally critical one. The jury’s still out on whether Jugdral or Tellius succeeds the most (fails the least?) of the FE settings at developing a complete world with a nuanced and resonant saga narrative, but that Tellius manages to be competitive while being kind of clumsy overall with racism and shifting the series’s overarching motif of dragon-blooded superhumans to one of kinky interracial sex is pretty impressive. The less I say about Ike the better since it’s only his endings in RD that save him for me; suffice it to point out that his worldview and general personality were clearly designed to appeal to a demographic that does not include me.

And finally comes The Sacred Stones, truly my average benchmark FE as I like it but struggle to have any particularly strong feelings on it one way or the other. The story is standard but has a few intriguing quirks, like the light vs. dark magic meta, surprise necrophilia, and how the main antagonist’s sexuality sort of depends on which route you take (except he’s still never getting laid so does it really matter?). It also seems to have been the first game to have made a legitimate effort toward the kind of replayability that’s normal for RPGs, what with the branched promotions, the route split, and the actual postgame. That’s all much more engaging than just filling up a support log. The gameplay is also more polished and (I think?) more balanced than the other GBA games, if one is willing to overlook the minor issue of Seth. Let’s see…something something twincest that’s now an IS running gag, something something guys talking intimately about their lances, something something SoV did the whole dungeon crawling with monsters bit better but I can forgive SS for not taking it that far. Moving on….

The “they have Problems” Tier - FE14, FE13

Probably qualifies as a fandom heresy, but yes I’m putting Fates first of these two. Fates is in every conceivable way for me the “You Tried” game, because I had such high hopes for it from the moment we got the earliest promotional content. I was expecting a World of Warcraft-style conflict between two morally grey factions with myriad convoluted grievances against each other messily resolving themselves one way or the other according to player choice (though note that this is already somewhat damning with faint praise as no one’s going to call WoW a storytelling masterpiece), with Conquest in particular a true villain campaign that I imagined might play out as European Imperialism: The Game. What we actually got was…not that, not at all, but amid all the complaints about plot holes and idiot balls and moral myopia most fans seem to have forgotten just how much there is to this game. It’s three full stories that together average out to be just about passable, with possibly the biggest gameplay variety in the series that fixed most of Awakening’s more broken elements (pair-up, children being unquestionably superior to the first generation) while also adding in new features that undoubtedly appealed to someone or other like Phoenix mode and the castle-building aspect. I can even mostly forgive the obvious growing pains Fates exhibits in terms of queer content, as they were pretty much inevitable once the developers realized that (almost) everyone was picking up on the subtext and that that approach just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Again, they tried, and if the results included face-touching fanservice and plot contrivances left and right and two-way cultural posturing that inevitably crosses over into real world racism at some point I can still step back for a moment and acknowledge that Fates began as a distinctive, high-concept setting on par with Tellius and Jugdral that was willing to do something different with the narrative norm (for two of its routes at least, and even so I’m not begrudging Birthright its conventionality because that grounding is important overall). And who knows? Maybe a later game will come along and retroactively make this setting coherent.

Fates might have more sexual fanservice, but if there’s any FE that I feel ends up a slave to fanservice in a broader sense it would be Awakening. Yeah, I get that when it was in development everyone thought this would be the final game, so it makes sense that the finished product turned out to be a nostalgia-laden greatest hits piece. It’s still hard to forgive Awakening for feeling so insubstantial, doubly so since it ended up revitalizing the franchise and now it and Fates are everywhere. It’s got a plot that only makes some sense in light of SoV and possibly on a meta level (following my theory that the plot structure is meant to mirror FE1-3 in sequence), the first iteration of an Avatar dating game heavily coloring the characterization and support system, and a queasily feel-good atmosphere that allows almost no character to actually remain dead and centers everything around the self-insert and the power of friendship. So much for the series’s traditionally dim view of human nature and recurring theme of the inevitability of conflict. What’s more, in spite of its theoretically broad scope (including a criminally under-explored time travel plot with a bad future) and numerous call-backs to older games Awakening does surprisingly little for developing the series’s most frequently-visited setting. I think it was in large part how generic this game has always felt to me even before release that I never got very hyped for it and as a consequence was never very disappointed by it. It’s just….there, with its nostalgia and its chronic “no homo” and its host of hilariously broken mechanics. I wonder if we’d have ended up viewing Awakening more favorably if it really had been the last game? Eh, probably not.

The “needs a remake or needs a better remake” Tier - FE5, FE6, FE3/12, FE1/11

I don’t have a specific order for these, except that FE1/11 is almost certainly the bottom since 5 and 6 have remake potential and, lack of localization aside, New Mystery was a better remake than Shadow Dragon.

I still haven’t fully played Thracia 776, but I’ve watched and read through Let’s Plays and have read more than enough analysis and meta on the game to where I can definitively say that I wouldn’t enjoy playing it too much and don’t feel all that emotionally connected to the story except insofar as it relates to the overall Jugdral saga. The concept of a standard FE plot that ends with the playable cast losing is an intriguing one, though they really could have done better than the weird non-ending that is this game’s final boss. I’m also not as invested in Leif the fallen aristocrat as I usually am those types of characters, possibly because it’s a foregone conclusion that he eventually gets his kingship anyway. I would like a remake, hopefully one that smooths over some of the original’s mechanical roughness and also makes a bunch of characters gay because the material’s certainly there in places, but I also admit that I’d rather have a remake of Genealogy first. Or, for that matter….

Binding Blade doesn’t have the potential for an amazing story-driven remake that Thracia does; after all, it’s basically a soft reboot of FE1 with an equally bland lord saved by his Super Smash Bros. fanbase and possibly his weirdly large harem. That said, there’s a fair amount of character potential and worldbuilding opportunities what with the series’s first true support system and the content of its unorthodox prequel. Even by itself I feel like BB does more to sell Elibe as its own distinctive world than any of Marth’s games ever did for Archanea, and that’s even with the reality that like the Archanea games this playable cast is inflated with some really forgettable characters (that seem to have followed a semi-rigid numerical quota by class in this instance. It’s weird.). This game never really stuck in my mind as a good playable experience either, not helped by the fact that it feels simple and antiquated compared not only to the GBA games that followed it but to the Jugdral games that preceded it. Good on them for throwing out some of Thracia’s more unwieldy mechanics, but did they have to throw out skills, hybrid classes, and varied chapter objectives too? The space limitations of the GBA couldn’t have been that severe.

While I’ve been spending much of this post ragging on Archanea, I will say that (New) Mystery of the Emblem has some interesting character beats, like the resolution of the Camus/Nyna/Hardin tragedy, Rickard and the situationally bisexual(?) Julian, and some of the antics of Marth’s retainers. I did like bits of the remake’s new assassin plot even if most of it is cribbed from the Black Fang; Eremiya’s no Sonia, but Clarisse and Katarina have their moments. Also, Kris isn’t that offensive to me since I was never all that engaged in Marth’s inconsistent personality and from what I’ve seen his/her supports don’t all devolve into a dating sim. New Mystery has a broader array of characters than either the original or the previous remake, without requiring the player to kill off characters just to get some of the new ones. That said, the reclassing in the DS games is still broken and allows the player to strip even more character out of their personality-deprived units. I’m getting to the point where I’m having trouble separating the two actually, so I’ll just go ahead and remark that I think everyone can agree that Shadow Dragon is the worst of the three remakes so far, with no supports, the aforementioned killing of units, a prologue that adds to the story but only exists on Normal mode and also requires you to kill someone off (seriously, what is it with this game? Is it commentary on the necessary sacrifices of war that they tried forcing on the player for one game until they realized it was a terrible idea?), the needless removal of features from earlier games like rescuing even as others like weapon ranks and forging were left in, that first clumsy iteration of reclassing, and little to nothing that I can see as elevating the story above the standard fantasy adventure fare of Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light that might have been good in 1990 but didn’t look so hot in 2008. Archanea just feels so lifeless overall compared to every other setting in the franchise, to the point where I don’t even feel that guilty about putting the first game in the series way down at the bottom when over in the Zelda ranking I raised the NES games above ones I found more fun to play solely because of their historical significance. Isn’t FE1 arguably the first tactical RPG? I feel like I should appreciate it more, but I just can’t. *shrugs*

[wickedbananas]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index — maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days — 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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[mypersonalparadox-blog1]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[un-chat-sauvage-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[aaliyahjayxo-blog1]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[iimio-high-blog1]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[coloss-us-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[eve-evi-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[tvrdojezgreno-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[bruised-barbie-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[hoshimiii-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[hipstei-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[loretorain-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[v-ermouth-blog]

Moz's Link Data Used to Suck... But Not Anymore! The New Link Explorer is Here - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm very excited to say that Moz's Open Site Explorer product, which had a lot of challenges with it, is finally being retired, and we have a new product, Link Explorer, that's taking its place. So let me walk you through why and how Moz's link data for the last few years has really kind of sucked. There's no two ways about it.

If you heard me here on Whiteboard Friday, if you watched me at conferences, if you saw me blogging, you'd probably see me saying, "Hey, I personally use Ahrefs, or I use Majestic for my link research." Moz has a lot of other good tools. The crawler is excellent. Moz Pro is good. But Open Site Explorer was really lagging, and today, that's not the case. Let me walk you through this.

The big complaints about OSE/Mozscape

1. The index was just too small

Mozscape was probably about a fifth to a tenth the size of its competitors. While it got a lot of the quality good links of the web, it just didn't get enough. As SEOs, we need to know all of the links, the good ones and the bad ones.

2. The data was just too old

So, in Mozscape, a link that you built on November 1st, you got a link added to a website, you're very proud of yourself. That's excellent. You should expect that a link tool should pick that up within maybe a couple weeks, maybe three weeks at the outside. Google is probably picking it up within just a few days, sometimes hours.

Yet, when Mozscape would crawl that, it would often be a month or more later, and by the time Mozscape processed its index, it could be another 40 days after that, meaning that you could see a 60- to 80-day delay, sometimes even longer, between when your link was built and when Mozscape actually found it. That sucks.

3. PA/DA scores took forever to update

PA/DA scores, likewise, took forever to update because of this link problem. So the index would say, oh, your DA is over here. You're at 25, and now maybe you're at 30. But in reality, you're probably far ahead of that, because you've been building a lot of links that Mozscape just hasn't picked up yet. So this is this lagging indicator. Sometimes there would be links that it just didn't even know about. So PA and DA just wouldn't be as accurate or precise as you'd want them to be.

4. Some scores were really confusing and out of date

MozRank and MozTrust relied on essentially the original Google PageRank paper from 1997, which there's no way that's what's being used today. Google certainly uses some view of link equity that's passed between links that is similar to PageRank, and I think they probably internally call that PageRank, but it looks nothing like what MozRank was called.

Likewise, MozTrust, way out of date, from a paper in I think 2002 or 2003. Much more advancements in search have happened since then.

Spam score was also out of date. It used a system that was correlated with what spam looked like three, four years ago, so much more up to date than these two, but really not nearly as sophisticated as what Google is doing today. So we needed to toss those out and find their replacements as well.

5. There was no way to see links gained and lost over time

Mozscape had no way to see gained and lost links over time, and folks thought, "Gosh, these other tools in the SEO space give me this ability to show me links that their index has discovered or links they've seen that we've lost. I really want that."

6. DA didn't correlate as well as it should have

So over time, DA became a less and less indicative measure of how well you were performing in Google's rankings. That needed to change as well. The new DA, by the way, much, much better on this front.

7. Bulk metrics checking and link reporting was too hard and manual

So folks would say, "Hey, I have this giant spreadsheet with all my link data. I want to upload that. I want you guys to crawl it. I want to go fetch all your metrics. I want to get DA scores for these hundreds or thousands of websites that I've got. How do I do that?" We didn't provide a good way for you to do that either unless you were willing to write code and loop in our API.

8. People wanted distribution of their links by DA

They wanted distributions of their links by domain authority. Show me where my links come from, yes, but also what sorts of buckets of DA do I have versus my competition? That was also missing.

So, let me show you what the new Link Explorer has.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Wow, look at that magical board change, and it only took a fraction of a second. Amazing.

What Link Explorer has done, as compared to the old Open Site Explorer, is pretty exciting. I'm actually very proud of the team. If you know me, you know I am a picky SOB. I usually don't even like most of the stuff that we put out here, but oh my god, this is quite an incredible product.

1. Link Explorer has a GIANT index

So I mentioned index size was a big problem. Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had and, as you can see, very, very competitive with the other services out there. Majestic Fresh says they have about a trillion URLs from their I think it's the last 60 days. Ahrefs, about 3 trillion. Majestic's historic, which goes all time, has about 7 trillion, and Moz, just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index - maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days - 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs. Just really, really big. It covers a huge swath of the web, which is great.

2. All data updates every 24 hours

So, unlike the old index, it is very fresh. Every time it finds a new link, it updates PA scores and DA scores. The whole interface can show you all the links that it found just yesterday every morning.

3. DA and PA are tracked daily for every site

You don't have to track them yourself. You don't have to put them into your campaigns. Every time you go and visit a domain, you will see this graph showing you domain authority over time, which has been awesome.

For my new company, I've been tracking all the links that come in to SparkToro, and I can see my DA rising. It's really exciting. I put out a good blog post, I get a bunch of links, and my DA goes up the next day. How cool is that?

4. Old scores are gone, and new scores are polished and high quality

So we got rid of MozRank and MozTrust, which were very old metrics and, frankly, very few people were using them, and most folks who were using them didn't really know how to use them. PA basically takes care of both of them. It includes the weight of links that come to you and the trustworthiness. So that makes more sense as a metric.

Spam score is now on a 0 to 100% risk model instead of the old 0 to 17 flags and the flags correlate to some percentage. So 0 to 100 risk model. Spam score is basically just a machine learning built model against sites that Google penalized or banned.

So we took a huge amount of domains. We ran their names through Google. If they couldn't rank for their own name, we said they were penalized. If we did a site: the domain.com and Google had de-indexed them, we said they were banned. Then we built this risk model. So in the 90% that means 90% of sites that had these qualities were penalized or banned. 2% means only 2% did. If you have a 30% spam score, that's not too bad. If you have a 75% spam score, it's getting a little sketchy.

5. Discovered and lost links are available for every site, every day

So again, for this new startup that I'm doing, I've been watching as I get new links and I see where they come from, and then sometimes I'll reach out on Twitter and say thank you to those folks who are linking to my blog posts and stuff. But it's very, very cool to see links that I gain and links that I lose every single day. This is a feature that Ahrefs and Majestic have had for a long time, and frankly Moz was behind on this. So I'm very glad that we have it now.

6. DA is back as a high-quality leading indicator of ranking ability

So, a note that is important: everyone's DA has changed. Your DA has changed. My DA has changed. Moz's DA changed. Google's DA changed. I think it went from a 98 to a 97. My advice is take a look at yourself versus all your competitors that you're trying to rank against and use that to benchmark yourself. The old DA was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate. You can see that in the correlations.

7. Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking is now easy

Building link lists, tracking links that you want to acquire, and bulk metrics checking, which we never had before and, in fact, not a lot of the other tools have this link tracking ability, is now available through possibly my favorite feature in the tool called Link Tracking Lists. If you've used Keyword Explorer and you've set up your keywords to watch those over time and to build a keyword research set, very, very similar. If you have links you want to acquire, you add them to this list. If you have links that you want to check on, you add them to this list. It will give you all the metrics, and it will tell you: Does this link to your website that you can associate with a list, or does it not? Or does it link to some page on the domain, but maybe not exactly the page that you want? It will tell that too. Pretty cool.

8. Link distribution by DA

Finally, we do now have link distribution by DA. You can find that right on the Overview page at the bottom.

Look, I'm not saying Link Explorer is the absolute perfect, best product out there, but it's really, really damn good. I'm incredibly proud of the team. I'm very proud to have this product out there.

If you'd like, I'll be writing some more about how we went about building this product and a bunch of agency folks that we spent time with to develop this, and I would like to thank all of them of course. A huge thank you to the Moz team.

I hope you'll do me a favor. Check out Link Explorer. I think, very frankly, this team has earned 30 seconds of your time to go check it out.

Try out Link Explorer!

All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!