Leeds SEO

I personally like Linkscape more, in that I think it provides you with more information in one go.

Majestic is a great tool and I think the potential is there for it to either surpass Linkscape or at least force Linkscape to incorporate some new features. Majestic is particularly useful as it provides updates on the links and charts them for you. This is a great way to help visualise the efforts of linkbuilding campaigns and, to a certain degree, see how your competition is faring on a linkbuilding front.

The ability to compare this progress against other sites/competitors is also a really nice feature. I have not yet been able to play around with any of the pay service/advanced reporting on Majestic (it is hard to justify paying for both). I would love to hear any opinions people have on the pro version of Majestic (particularly if they have used Linkscape with advanced reporting).

I am really torn when comparing like to like… I think the free version of Majestic may be slightly more useful for linkbuilding and monitoring the progress of this. Meanwhile, I think the free version of Linkscape may be more accurate in providing you with page/mozRank of your own site and of your competitors.

Ultimately, I think one would have to compare these two tools at full strength to make a fair evaluation.

However, the fact that becoming a promember on SEOmoz includes access to a number of other tools and more and more seem to be under development it would take a very convincing argument for me to make the switch (or pay for Majestic as well).

Any advice/opinions on this would be greatly appreciated!

I am using Majestic SEO, for monitoring the link building, it as well was very useful to see the historical data on the links, as with localisation on the search engine results it is quite good to know from which countries we have links and so improve regions we do not have much links from. and to identify important pages to have redirects which have not been done.

I use linkscape but I can’t help feeling both have the potential to be around 100x better than they are currently.

As soon as Majestic can get soemthing close to mozRank (i.e not just amount of the inpointing links, but the strength of them too), then I think that could really open things up. Linkscape on the other hand has the challenge of producing other useful metrics to tell the quality/relevance/diversity etc of a backlink profile as well as just it’s raw strength – the potential of what could be done with linkscape is mind-blowing, but thats another blogpost altogether.

I’ll keep a close eye on both.

I like using both. I specifically like the history metrics Majestic offers, and the comparison metrics Linkscape offers. I’m also a big fan of how Majestic displays the data in a grid but at the same time, I love the advanced filtering I can do with Linkscape.

Could someone please explain to me (& I freely admit that I haven’t looked into this) why moz rank is more informative/accurate/useful than page rank?

Interesting result – my Seomoz pro membership is due and I’ve been wondering whether to renew it or go with Majestic – looks as though I’ll probably renew it.

I’m just going to point out that one of the big benifits of Majestic is that you only pay for what you use, not a huge concern, but it does make a difference, especially if you’re not using a lot of the other SEOMoz features (Or if you want to use both)

I have only used Linkscape but am interested in trying Majestic so great to see this discussion going on

One thing I do like about the metrics in linkscape is that the values are more precise than what you see in the toolbar.

With the values working on an exponential scale there is a BIG difference between say a 6 and a 7 and it is useful to have a clearer idea of where you actually are when comparing yourself to competitors.

I also like a lot of the comparison stuff in linkscape, though having not used Majestic I can’t say how this compares…

One thing that I don’t like about linkscape is that to me it still seems pretty buggy and frequently loads null values and questionable data, does anyone else find this?

I would also like to see more frequent updates and am interested to know how the freshness of majestic data compares?

Hey Stuart,

The sites I was looking at are in the car hire (travel) industry and pretty significant players so seems strange to find information missing. I know Linkscape is constantly under development though so this may explain the occasional blip…

I have been taking a look at Majestic SEO this afternoon and definitely going to give it a try, if nothing else to try and compare how it’s data compares with other comparable metrics

@stuartpturner

I will go back and re run some of the reports I have done in the past to see if the data still comes back in the same way and come back with my findings. TBH it is my bad that I didn’t mention it to the guys at seomoz earlier…. Especially since I was sat having a beer with Ben a couple of months ago!

The reason why mozRank is better than (or at least sufficiently interesting in addition to ) Pagerank is because it’s consistent and more transparent.

I understand mozRank and I know there’s not a ton of secret filters being run that affect it. It tells me in a straightforward way what the raw strength of a page is – I may need to go and work out what the quality of the backlink profile is , but I least I can i have trust that I know the strength.

The weakness is obviously that it doesnt know what filters/changes google use to discount certain links , but the correlation studies released show its close enough to be used as a guide.

I’m the marketing guy at Majestic. I hope you try us!

I should clear up one point. We moved to subscriptions at Christmas and also added loads of new “standard” reports… With really cool new easy filters.

There is a free option. But as “paid” starts at under 10 pounds a month, with no mininmum contract, we hope you’ll try it out!

I think we upped our game three days before Christmas.

Dixon.

@Dixon Jones I was thrilled when the subscription option came out, and it was one of the reasons Stu & I ended up having the debate, For me I think Majestic is much better when you really need to delve into link information & get your hands dirty, Linkscape has always been better for quick info IME, I’m hoping the new reports can change that.

Yep… Added another type of report since then. If the snow ever let’s me get to the office, discussing new videos is on the Agenda.

@stuartptur thanks for running the poll And thanks for pointing out all the other features you get with a SEOmoz PRO subscription. We try to offer the whole package.

@Matthew Oxley I agree both Linkscape and MajesticSEO could be 100x better. I hope that the work we’re doing will make some progress against that. Check out http://www.seomoz.org/labs for some of the stuff we’re hoping to roll out in a more easy to use, contextually relevant way soon.

@yoshimi_s one of the things we can do with mozRank, once we’ve got it, is examine how individual links contribute to a page’s mozRank. We call this “mozRank passed”. It’s not 100% perfect, but it’s better than just looking at a linking page’s pageRank (what if it’s no followed? what if there are dozens of links?)

I think you’ll be pleased with some work we’re releasing soon that isn’t just another PageRank like measurement.

@Mike we’re working really hard on index coverage. We only keep track of what we can verify within the last month or two. This means our live index is smaller than our “forever” index (~50 billion pages, ~500 billion links vs ~500 billion ~5 trillion or so). But it also means we don’t have a lot fewer links which expired many months or even years ago. I think this is the best decision for SEO. But we’ve got a couple features we’re working on right now to balancing that against coverage.

@stuartpturner

Thanks for getting this conversation going! I agree that the labs area is really exciting. I specifically use the backlink analysis and top pages tools in labs every single day usually for answering Q & A (also a pro feature). I’m obviously slightly biased, but as an SEO I love our tools.

Good to see a poll up on this, I’ve used both Linkscape since the early dev trials & Majestic as well, both have their strengths & weakness’s. I’ll admit I use linkscape far more often due to my pro membership & its integration into top pages & link intersect. Majestic SEO as @Tatiana above pointed out is good for measuring the history of a site, particularly as the Linkscape index seems to filter out some links (some for good reason). However sometimes I do want the full picture and for that Majestic is good, particularly cumalitive links.

Either way, I’d recommend both to inhouse and agency SEOs.

Majestic is sweet – I much prefer it than linkscape now although it took some getting used to