MajesticSEO
from MajesticSEO 736 Days ago#
Hi ChelseaBlacker, we've created special discounted subscription offers that you can swap your credits for - message on conversion should be shown on subscription packages page (if you have any credits left) and in Control Panel as well: we've explained this at the bottom of our subscription introductory page here: http://www.majesticseo.com/docs/credits/introducingsubscriptions.php
If you still have any queries about subscriptions or anything else, then please feel free to drop us an email: support AT majesticseo.com thanks!
from MajesticSEO 838 Days ago#
You are welcome! We were suprised too to see how big GeoCities really were: 850 mln external backlinks is nearly 0.1% (1 in 1000) of all external backlinks in our web graph index!
from MajesticSEO 839 Days ago#
> It was like I heard the sound of millions of links dying.
850,697,046 external backlinks from 916,529 referring domains! More details here.
from MajesticSEO 895 Days ago#
We've noticed that Yahoo shows nofollow backlinks as well as non-existant (anymore) in their backlink results around 2 years ago - there is value in this data and that's why we decided to keep it too.
from MajesticSEO 977 Days ago#
About time... maybe they will feel generous enough to email before removing sites from index as well.
from MajesticSEO 984 Days ago#
I was referring to "falsification" used in the title of this article - it will probably be shown differently on Bing though if someone bothers to link to it with some other anchor text :)Last thought for the night (it’s 1:35am in UK now!) - this article is useful because it shows that anchor text plays very important role in Bing’s rankings, in fact it creates possibilities for Black-hat SEO tricks that are not pleasant, chances are (if anyone cases to do it for Bing) after a few high profile attacks of this nature they will stop showing anchor text as title.Good night all! :)
from MajesticSEO 984 Days ago#
I view it as the next step that had to be done - Google was showing anchor text in place of titles for a long time now, but they did it mainly (if not exclusively) for urls that have not been crawled yet, and thus had no proper page title.Microsoft is trying to outdo Google, so when they were confronted with this problem they made another step forward - show anchor text in place of page title IF that particular page had most of matches in anchor text and nothing in title part of it. Merits of this decision can be debated (I would not be suprised if they undo it), but saying that this action is falsification is a bit too harsh - that’s my main point: give it some time and a few Bing-bombs and they will probably change this behavior - http://www.bing.com/search?q=miserable+failure - Bing is few years behind Google, so don’t be too harsh on them, they are improving :)
from MajesticSEO 984 Days ago#
> Thats what my personal blog is for and is why I titled that blog “Joe Hall”It can be argued that your blog page is the most relevant page on your site for that kind of query, however your homepage contains "Joe Hall" in its body, so from algorithmic search engine’s point of view such choice is not entirely unreasonable - in this case the page ranked mainly due to anchor text, so Microsoft tried to be smart and put it into place they usually reserve for titles.@NorthSouthMedia - if they have not used anchor text which they could see at the time of searching as best match for that url, then user won’t click on potentially very relevant site. Doing so is a good thing when it comes to driving visitors to relevant sites in my view.I’d say "falsification" is a bit too strong word for this behavior.
from MajesticSEO 984 Days ago#
Thanks Jill - it does look pretty likely cause to me: the most interesting part (you don’t see it on screenshot but drilling into further report for that anchor text) shows that most of backlinks for that anchor text come from nofollowed backlinks.Now, Google does not rank this site for this query, presumably because they do indeed discount nofollowed backlinks/anchor text, however in case of Bing it seems that Microsoft DID use them! This might expose them to blog spam, unless they only accept nofollowed backlinks from trusted sites.IMO Microsoft did a pretty good job in this case - it might be difficult to see why though without analysing domain backlinks/anchor text.
from MajesticSEO 984 Days ago#
It’s 100% anchor text driven - see screen shot of quick analysis of that domain: http://tinyurl.com/r7t8w5
from MajesticSEO 1004 Days ago#
Hey, thanks to everyone for sphinns and to David for giving us the opportunity to write about this subject! @TCotton: from our point of view it is a question of risk - hosting is a very competitive industry and it actually makes sense to move your site regularly anyway (deals only get better), so if you see some bad domains on your IP then why take risk? It’s just not worth it - choice of hosting is one of a few things under your control so it makes sense to make a good choice. Here is the bit that did not make into the story - our project site was banned by Google (completely removed from index) in January this year: it turned out that shared hosting we were using at the time (majesticseo.com site used dedicated IP and totally separate hosting already) on was hacked and invisible cloaked links were put on our front page, we could not see them as they were cloaked but Google did, so they auto banned us - luckily we got reincluded pretty quickly but after this lesson was learnt - we moved hosting. So if you see bad neighbours that appears to have been hacked (like one of the sites in our story) it means shared hosting might no be as secure as you think and this CAN KILL your site rankings dead. The risk is just not worth taking.
from MajesticSEO 1021 Days ago#
Hi SMCuter, we’d recommend the following:1) always look at referring domains charts because big spike on backlinks chart could be due to a handful of domains providing lots of sitewide backlinks2) compare multiple domains: this produces like-for-like view 3) bear in mind that our crawling has increased considerably since we started - when you analyse single domain the charts may show growth however this could be due to much bigger crawl, so for this case use Normalized view which shows how often backlinks were found to particular domain in each 1 mln crawled pages.4) high number of backlinks or even referring domains do not always translate into rankings - it all depends on quality and relevancy of those backlinks/ref domains, the charts won’t tell the whole story but you can get more detailed information by analysing actual backlinks/anchor text to those domains in question.
from MajesticSEO 1025 Days ago#
Hey, thanks to everyone for generous sphinns - I am trying my best to resist sphinning it too!Garrett: CSV exports of charts data will be available next week for analysed domains (those added to control panel) - this will allow to focus on particular elements of site (ie homepage or specific anchor text or some time period).Orphee: the data comes from our extensive crawl of the web - almost 3 years of it included in our index, this makes it very useful to look at backlink growth patterns over time - very addictive!
from MajesticSEO 1169 Days ago#
$20 bln seem excessive given very strong Microsoft’s hand right now.There are very good alternatives that do not depend on YSE, you just need to look for them.
from MajesticSEO 1172 Days ago#
I think Ian probably meant here that if page can’t be crawled then those outgoing links on it can’t be seen by search engines and thus the page can’t pass out PageRank or similiar algorithms.
Story: searchwiki Reputation Issues
from MajesticSEO 1172 Days ago#
It’s a legal minebomb and it won’t take long for it to go off - yet another poorly thought out feature.
from MajesticSEO 1173 Days ago#
Google has multiple indices - the one we all see is full-text final index, not every URL gets there, however they do have complete web-graph (also index) of the web used in PageRank calculations and other things. Any URL they find gets into web-graph and if has enough PR or it’s new domain (or whatever other rules are in place) it will be crawled, if successful and some outgoing links on that page are found then it MAY well pass PR without even being included into final full-text index.Chances are that the pages that don’t pass any PR are those that are penalised or had nofollow META tag in them or some other reasons.
from MajesticSEO 1173 Days ago#
The sites that rank for particular words are not necessarily authority, but some serious sites that linked to them might be and it is those backlinks that helped those non-authority sites to rank in the first place. The trick in identifying whether competitor uses any of such backlinks is to have access to detailed backlinks that they have - difficult using Yahoo Site Explorer if your competitor has got many backlinks: just like Google YSE does not show all the backlinks and does not show the most valuable either (though they tend to show more valuable ones than Google).One strategy can therefore be - get complete list of backlinks for your competitor from a competitive intelligence company like ours, filter them for .EDU ones and see what those links are about - some might be genuine review links, in this case you can try contacting the people who made review who might actually include you in this review or do another one. It can also help spot spammy paid links from cracked .EDU sites. The irony is that your competitor might not even know they have those if they outsourced link building to a shady company that just got them the ranking without telling exactly how they achieved it.
from MajesticSEO 1176 Days ago#
BrowseRank is a very interesting idea - it addresses artificial element in PageRank algorithm which is random jump away from page - the matter of fact is that links are not equal on a page and some will get clicked more than others. From a lot of links on this page the ones I am likely to click (apart from navigation) would be external link to that article, BrowseRank would take this into account and PageRank won’t. Would this allow to get better ranking results than PageRank? Possibly, Google does not talk much about it but I am pretty sure they have something like BrowseRank - backlinks analysis can yield very interesting results even without browser ;)
from MajesticSEO 1177 Days ago#
Looks like it was removed - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/22/google-searchwiki-vanishes/ - good riddance as it’s a terrible idea with terrible implementation.
from MajesticSEO 1250 Days ago#
The name of the bot (and answers to other questions) can be found in our FAQ. If you wish to prevent our bot from crawling your sites you can add the following to robots.txt:User-agent: MJ12botDisallow: /Ann however is 100% correct saying that the only thing such blocks will achieve is prevent seeing sites linked FROM your domain - the competitor (if they want to understand your site) will be most interested in completely different thing - who links TO you, for this it is totally unnecessary to crawl your site. In fact some sites prevent all bots from crawling them, yet this is not usually an issue in terms of competition analysis because any well developed site would have natural links and it is those natural links that are the most valuable. So by blocking our bot all you’d achieve is prevent yourself from getting free reports (and those will improve big time overtime) and ironically the block itself might provide intelligence information about relationship between those sites.You might think that you are not interested in your own backlinks - I think it would be a bit of a shortsighted view because we include those backlinks that Yahoo/Google would prefer not to show to you - this could be highly valuable backlinks, or backlinks that bad neighbourhoods that can occur when your content is stolen by other people or they just link to you, knowing such backlinks can help you devise counter strategies before it may get negative effect on your site.Have you thought about black had SEOs creating bad links to you in order to hurt your rankings? This is something you can see in your own backlinks for free (as long as you let our bot crawl your site)."If you have any evidence that these people use the information in any other way advertised (e.g. use any private information)"Not sure what this "private information" may be, but we only use publicly available data from public websites - the same way any other big search engine does, the only difference is that Google exposes very little of that, Yahoo shows more via Site Explorer and we only show full details in 2 cases - if you verify your site or buy it, the latter actually greatly limits competitor analysis that in many cases is done for free via Site Explorer - effectively if you are worried about that you should worry more about Site Explorer since they offer free sneak peak into data where as in our case price is a fairly big barrier.Again, Ann is correct suggesting that such things are likely to be seen in YSE anyway - I think it would be worthwhile for people to read our FAQ: it contains some background information that I think is worth considering.
from MajesticSEO 1251 Days ago#
Erm, that was not me (obviously), this is probably one of our project members (if you check our project site you will see that we’ve got over 100 project members), just like everyone else he or she is entitled to their own opinion. If anyone has got any questions about our tool please feel free to contact us, I don’t really want to abuse hospitality of this site - I tried my best to avoid being involved (did not sphunn this story for example) but had to answer some of the questions that were posted here.
from MajesticSEO 1251 Days ago#
> all crawl ready for you if a competitor orders it.I think you are confusing how it works. Let’s say your competitor wants a report on your domain: only EXTERNAL backlinks will be used for that report. This means it is irrelevant whether your site is actually crawled or not - the competitive strength mostly comes from external backlinks and if your competitor wants to know your internal linking then they can easily do anyway, it’s just not what we focus on.robots.txt is checked (alongside with unique checking file) during free site verification to confirm that the person who verifies it is indeed the owner in order to prevent competitors getting free access to your site analysis.Don’t really want to turn this page into discussion forum - give the tool a go, all the details are there.
from MajesticSEO 1251 Days ago#
Applying for free report does not trigger anything - we don’t tell people who applied for free report, this is confidentital information. The only "catch" in getting free reports is allowing our bot to crawl your site - we can’t actually verify it if robots.txt disallows access. The purpose of our desire to crawl your site (most already allow that anyway) is its inclusion into full-text search engine on which we working on - Majestic-SEO allows us to learn relevancy better and fund development of the full-text search. If your site is not in our database yet (and it usually means it is very fresh or lacks backlinks) then you can still add it so that you can see how new backlinks are found from daily crawls.
from MajesticSEO 1251 Days ago#
Our bot certainly obeys robots.txt. I don’t think crawling of your site in any way affects analysis that your competitors might want to do - in this case only _external_ backlinks are considered, so it is not really important if your site is crawled or not as internal backlinks are not used for analysis: any competitor can easily check it on your site if they wish to.Applying for a free report does not change much - we ask for our bot to crawl your site in exchange for this information, but as I explained above in terms of competitive analysis it does not affect anything really.In terms of "safe harbour", then no, there is no such concept - we thought about it and felt it would be unethical to limit access, so for example anyone can get competitive information on our own websites - we are in exactly the same position as everyone else.
Story: Bulk Backlink Checker