The Players

In case you are brand new to SEO, let me take a minute to identify your options for backlink research. You really only have two options – Majestic SEO & SEOMoz Linkscape. Historically, Yahoo provided this data for free. Ever since Bing! started to power Yahoo Search, there have been issues with Yahoo! backlink data. Google and Microsoft do offer decent link data if you can verify you are a webmaster of a site. But forget about any useful backlink data on other websites.

There are a handful of other companies that claim to provide backlink data. I have not found a single one of them that can come close to Majestic or SEOMoz. Some of them are simply repackaging data that they get from Majestic and/or SEOMoz. If you think I overlooked a legitimate contender please contact me and I’ll be happy to explain why you are wrong.

Common Points

Majestic and SEOMoz have a lot more in common than what separates them. Both of these services run on a subscription models with some free options. They are both regularly crawling the internet for new data. Of course they report on anchor text and referring url. They also make it easy to identify links that are dofollow vs nofollow. Both of them report on redirects and image links. They both have created their own ranking system to help webmasters rate the value of links. They both have great customer service that quickly help customers. Neither has become sophisticated enough to take into account the relevancy and appropriate themeing of backlinks (for that matter even google still has trouble). Unfortunately, for me both of these companies are too cheap to try to bribe me :(.

How I Tested Them

I tried to create a fair test for both of them. I choose 8 of my favorite websites to research the backlinks for. For a giggle I made sure each website somehow was related to food. For the sake of pseudo-science, I made sure they were diverse to reflect the wide variety of websites. I then compared the reported backlinks for the homepage for each of these 8 websites.

The lucky guinea pigs are:
www.bigmexpress.com – Local New York City Fishing Boat
www.charitywater.org – International Charity
theoatmeal.com – Viral Comic Genius
chowhound.chow.com – Foodies Forum
www.domperignon.com – Famous Champagne
www.epicurious.com – National Food Magazines & Recipes
www.zapps.com – Local New Orleans Potato Chip Maker
www.zerowater.com – National Water Filter Producer

As I was writing this post I had a big problem. The backlink data from Majestic & SEOMoz kept changing because they kept crawling more sites and refreshing their data sets. It is great news for webmasters that both of these companies have a regular flow of updated backlink data. For someone that is trying to test them and write up the results, it was headache. After several foolish attempts of me trying to update my post with the most current data, I just decided to take a snapshot of data.

What are the Numbers?

Majestic SEO Review

Any review about Majestic SEO has to talk about their massive dataset. Last year when I tested Majestic SEO, it returned the biggest numbers of backlinks and it still does. As for the quality of the data, that is entirely up to how you use the numerous filter options they provide. Majestic SEO enables the biggest link geeks to slice and dice the backlink data to their hearts’ content. Majestic SEO has made many improvements from last year and it is even better. Now you can generate a report that tells you all the links your competition has gained and identify any links your website lost. From my perspective that intel is seo gold. They are crawling sites everyday and releasing new data sets several times a month (probably going to keep getting faster).

That being said, my biggest complaint is their ugly interface. To their credit they have improved the interface alot since last year. I still feel Majestic SEO is like a Ferrari engine in a minivan. It may not look super cool but it has great performance. IMHO Majestic SEO still seems to be not as easy to learn how to use. Many of their best features I couldn’t figure out within 30 seconds. Yes I know I am impatient, but I bet many other SEO people are lazy and/or impatient as well. I just wish this Ferrari was as simple to drive as a golf cart

ps I also hate that Majestic SEO is a European company which makes it more expensive with credit card finance charges and exchange rates. They told me that they will soon have a solution for that, which would be awesome from my perspective.

SEOMoz Linkscape Review

First let me clarify this is a review of SEOMoz Linkscape and Open Site Explorer. They are both backlink research tools available to SEOMoz subscribers. Open Site Explorer is a good tool for entry level SEO work and Linkscape enables more features for advanced users. They are constantly improving Open Site Explorer and it has some new features Linkscape does not have.

What I like best about SEOMoz is that they have one of the widest SEO toolsets. They have keyword tools, page optimization tools, social media tools and much more. What I like second best about SEOMoz is that they have very good usability. Their tools are easy to understand. SEOMoz made it very easy to find backlinks for deep pages on a website. That is a really great feature. SEOMoz does a great job focusing on accuracy. The quality of their is great. In this test I did not encounter a single falsely reported link, which is a huge time saver. They recrawl their entire data set for each monthly update and are working on even more frequent updates. SEOMoz almost makes it easier to compare links with their mozTrust and mozRank scores. This is a helpful feature when you are trying to sort through 10,000 links and just go straight to the valuable links.

Some issues I had with SEOMoz is that their dataset seemed to be english-centric. They seem to not be as strong when dealing with international backlink data. I do appreciate that SEOMoz focuses on accuracy. I just wished they focused a little more on growth and the breadth of data. I don’t understand why they have two backlink tools. I use both Linkscape & Open Site Explorer and it just seems mostly redundant with a few reporting anomalies.

Majestic SEO retains the backlink trophy for another year!

I found that both of them are much better than a year ago. Last year’s wish list for new features was mostly answered. At the end, my inner link geek just fell in love with all of the data Majestic SEO had and the great ways of analyzing that data. To be fair I have to say you are a fool if you aren’t also subscribing to SEOMoz. Most of the time Majestic SEO returned more link data. Despite SEOMoz returning less data I still found a handful of quality links that SEOMoz discovered and Majestic SEO did not. If you are serious about backlink research, you should definitely also use SEOMoz.

Try Majestic SEO
Try SEOMoz Toolset

ps thanks to the Majestic SEO & SEOMoz teams, even though neither of them bribed me or gave me affiliate links so i could get some kickbacks

How could I have such a crazy opinion about Google?  Let me explain.

Google is tracking and recording just about every bit of personal usage data they can get.  It does not matter if you have a Google user account or not.  Even if you have never logged into Google, they have been smart enough to create a unique account to store your personal usage data.

The personal user accounts that Google maintains for every person can keep track of what computer you use, your geographic location,  what you have searched for, what websites you like to visit and much more.  They can store this data even on people who have never created a Google account and think they are using Google anonymously.

• Do you remember when you researched your child’s lice problem?  Google does

• Do you remember last Valentine’s day when you searched for some private adult items?  Google does

• Do you remember which months you search for diets aids and which ones you search for chocolate?  Google does

• Do you remember searching for a local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting?  Google does

At least with a nosy neighbor you can close your window curtains to stop them from seeing what you are doing.  It is much harder to stop Google from collecting and storing this data.  Let’s say you are going to uninstall the Google Toolbar that the factory shipped your computer with and never visit Google.com again.  It is estimated that Google’s tracking code is installed and collecting data from about 30% of all websites online.  Imagine if your nosy neighbor was collaborating with 30% of the houses on your block to track and record everything you do.

Google has a good reason to be tracking and recording this data.  MONEY!  Google can be more profitable by analyzing you and showing you more relevant ads on Google.com and the millions of websites that form their ad network.  In general I am okay with improving relevancy because it helps users and advertisers. My problem is when the pursuit of better relevancy overrules many privacy considerations.

In case you have searched for vacation home rentals and then visited an automotive website that showed you ads for vacation homes and wondered how that happened – you can likely thank Google’s Adsense program.  Or if you bought some adult diapers online and then visited a cooking recipe website and saw adult diaper ads showing, you can again thank Google for tracking your personal usage data.

As much as I enjoy adult diaper ads appearing on totally unrelated websites,  I do not feel comfortable with Google tracking personal usage data.  The risk of having just anyone see my personal information or my family’s information is creepy and scary.

How can anyone see this information?  AOL has already accidentally released the usage data on 650,000 human beings.  That information was able to be traced back to users including a retired lady in Florida who was researching some slightly embarrassing medical conditions for her friends.  Google can also make a mistake like AOL’s and release information.

Even if Google is infallible (because we all know large corporations never make mistakes),  the data is not safe because Google has already been hacked.  Google is a huge target of hackers.  I would guess that they face a hack attack about every second of everyday or about 2.6 million attempts in a month. The odds are some of these security attacks will be successful.  Recently a Chinese hacking attack was able to defeat Google’s safeguards.  The hackers accessed and downloaded information on many human activists which was supposedly being kept safe by Google.

Let’s not forget human nature – because Google does employ thousands of people with different levels of security access.  What’s stopping one of these Google employees from going to work and stealing the data to resell it.  How valuable do you think having all of this usage data for hundreds of millions of people is?  It would also be a great way for a disgruntled Google employee to hurt the company with millions of innocent individuals being stripped of their privacy.  By the way that Chinese hacking attack is suspected to have been helped by an internal Google employee.

This is not a new issue.  For over 10 years there have been many articles written about online privacy including this very informative one by search industry leader Danny Sullivan writing about Google privacy concerns in 2003.  Yet most people are still unaware or just don’t care about online privacy.

Some people may not care because Google does not intentionally attach your name to your usage data file.  With a little bit of analyzing you could probably figure quite alot of personal detail from these numbered usage data files.  Have you ever searched for your name in Google?  Or your relatives name?  Have you ever searched for directions and always used your home address?  Have you ever entered your credit card number accidentally into the search box instead of the checkout page?  All of that information has been captured.  With a bit of analyzing it would not be hard to figure out your name, home address, credit card number and possibly even your social security number or anything else you have typed into the search box either intentionally or accidentally.  That potential exposure is way creepier to me than anything my neighbor could make me feel.

What can you do? Start with being more aware.  You really do not have any privacy online.  What you do online is being recorded and the odds are good that whatever you do online will eventually be revealed. With the supercomputers that are becoming more and more common it will not be hard to analyze the “anonymous” data usage and track them back to individuals.  Happy websurfing!

If you have ever worked on improving a website’s ranking Google you know that there are rules you must follow.  If you break any of Google’s rules (either intentionally or accidentally) you run the risk of your website being penalized or possibly even banned from Google.  Since Google has a quasi monopoly over online search most people would never dream of doing anything that might attract the wrath of Google.  Target, one of the biggest retailers in the U.S. does not share that point of view.

Target.com is currently flooding the Google search results with millions of near identical error pages.

Why does this matter?  Because when you have a powerful site like Target.com and you start hanging millions of pages off of it you are bound to get some decent rankings regardless of how terrible your page is.  For example Target.com is currently ranking #1 for Exercise Bike Clearance.

Imagine if each page generates just one visitor each day.  We are talking millions of Google users being tricked into visiting Target.com.  Does this page really live up to Google’s rhetoric about delivering a good user experience?

Instead of Google removing these pages that are obviously error pages they instead are rewarding Target’s spam attempt with high rankings and online holiday traffic.  In case you think for one second that you should do this on your website – THINK TWICE.

Google’s algorithm gives preferential treatment to big brand websites.  Big brands have more links and more trustworthy websites referring to them.  That link popularity is quite powerful in the Google algorithm.  I am not even going to get into the quality signals that Google sees from the high level of toolbar usage coming from people visiting Target.com.  The Target.com domain has so much power in the Google algorithm they can bend the Google quality rules more than any small mom & pop website can.

Another thing to remember is that users searching on Google expect to see big brands in the search results.  If they don’t see them they think that Google is broken.  Google is in a difficult position.  They need to balance user expectation of seeing big brands in the serps while still controlling the big brands.

I just hope that something is done because Google users deserve higher quality serps &  smaller retailers deserve more equality when it comes to Google’s quality standards.

My forehead really hurts from the repeated times I smacked my forehead after listening to a semi-experienced webmaster running a profitable websites and totally misunderstanding a basic concept. One common feeling that I found was that press releases suck and are worthless for internet marketing. As you could probably tell from my blog title, I disagree with this.

I (and many of my colleagues) regularly use press releases for internet marketing and PROFIT from it.

How is this possible? Well let me first tell you how I don’t use a press release…

Simple Paid Link – If you think of a press release as simply paying $100 and getting a link then you are gonna lose money.

Ego Boost – If you are submitting press releases because you like to see your google alert for your name get triggered well congrats on seeing your name online but it is not the best way to profit online.

Generic Content Distribution – By submitting a press release for every page of your boring, crappy content you are probably creating more of a duplicate content issue than any promotion benefit. People don’t care about generic, boring, crappy content.

How should you use a press release…

Selectively Promote Best Content – Only use a press release when you have content that is interesting. I don’t care if you think its interesting or if your mom thinks your are special. If I gave your press release to 100 people waiting at a train station would more than half read past the first paragraph? Don’t worry every industry (including your boring industry – no offense to you but its probably true) has an interesting angle you can use for a press release. You just need to be creative or hire something that is creative.

Attracting Traffic Leads to Links – Technically a press release is a paid link because you are paying a submission and it will probably lead to some links but don’t think of it as paid link. Take pride in having your press release being so interesting that it gets picked up by bloggers and newspaper editors. If you focus on having a high quality press release that attracts real readers I guarantee you it will also gain backlinks. If you are only focusing on the paid link aspect you are probably pushing a low quality press release that will likely deliver low to no link benefit.

Overall you want to use a press release as a promotional tool that just happens to have a side effect of attracting links to quality content. Come up with a funny top 10 list or a useful guide for that new product in your industry. Just come up with something that has value and will be interesting to someone other than you. Otherwise just ignore this blog post and keep on ignoring the benefits that press releases can bring to your website

By this I mean it is only natural that people will want their sites in Google and will try their best to achieve it. Unless you regularly spend alot of time dealing with Google it is not simple or easy to know what to do and more importantly what to avoid. Here are some examples of “innocent search engine spam” that I have found working on a new modular home blog.
Sins of the father don’t clean themselves up

I came across a modular architect’s website. This modular architect is award-winning and commonly referenced by the press and good quality inbound links. You would expect to see his site do well. It doesn’t because the company that built his site in 2003 used hidden keyword stuffing (white font on white background). How do I know this because when I noticed the hidden text I checked out the html code and there was an actual comment in the code explaining everything. Clearly by the html comments they thought they were doing what Google wanted. The site is managed by a different web firm but the offending invisible text has not been removed.
Pretty Modular Homes Stink

Experienced internet marketers know where this is going – search engines are robots that can only read and can not read pretty images or video. No matter how pretty the site is, if you only have images, video or flash animation the search engines will not show you alot of search love. I have lost count how many sites have pages of quality text hidden from the search engines because it is in flash or images.

Even “Expert” Marketers Make Mistakes

Some of the modular housing sites are doing a great job. You can tell they have put alot of work into building good content with nice usability. But even these “expertly” optimized modular home websites have issues. The most common I notice is the improper use of 301 and 302 redirects. The worst use I have ever come across was a 301 into 302 into 302 into 302 into 302 into a 301 redirect. I would be shocked if the search engines had no issue with that setup. If you think you are an expert make sure to audit your work. It is easy to build up excessive layers over the years for your website. If you audit your website yearly you should be able to identify innocent mistakes that are easy for you to fix.

Productive people are great at avoiding time sucks. Those activities and situations that drain time and energy without returning any significant benefit. Here are some common time sucks to avoid.

Twitter – Yes, you can be profitable on twitter but most people that use twitter do it for personal enjoyment and this can be a big time suck. Lets say you twitter once an hour. Each time you twitter you spend 2 minutes reading the your friends tweets, then you take 1 minute to think of something to write, then you take 2 minutes to write your message and get it to fit 140 characters. That is 5 minutes a twitter and almost a full hour every day. What are you getting in return for that full hour? A few laughs and some friendships? In that one hour you could have written an great article or emailed 15 link requests or used Twitter to turn a profit by tweeting links to intersting content on your website.

Consulting Proposals – At what point should you provide your prospect a detailed proposal? If you don’t submit a proposal you can’t be awarded the job. But if you take the time to prepare a proposal for everyone you will never have time to properly service your key prospects. I find it helpful to first ask for a timeframe, requested goals and size of their budget before I take the time to create a proposal. If someone thinks that a #1 ranking is only worth $100 and they want it done yesterday then it would probably be smart to kindly decline to submit a proposal. By reducing the number of proposals you create, you just might actually end up with more business by being able to better create and improve the proposals you do submit to the more likely prospects.

Email Everywhere – We all struggle to keep up with our email since email can be critical to keeping up open communication lines. It can also be a time suck that leads you down that rabbit hole of unproductivity. Have you ever traded jokes back and forth with emails. Before you know it you have exchanged 20 emails in 30 minutes of time. That 30 minutes could probably have been used on something more profitable. Ever have a stranger email you asking a question? I love being nice and helping people but often those questions can take over 30 minutes to research, respond and find the links to the material the stranger could have found if they were good at using Google. I have learned to never underestimate the amount of “suck” email can be. I am not even going to mention the time it takes to clean out the inbox with the newsletters and other automated emails you get because you have never taken the time to unsubscribe or turn them off.

There are many time sucks. I would recommend keeping a timer on your desk and tracking how you spend every minute of your day. You will certainly find some activities that suck up your time and are not directly driving you profit. I am not advocating that you cut them all out. There are some activities that can be a big indirect help and mental health boost. You should be aware of where your time goes so you can better maximize it.
Carpe Diem aka get your ass in gear

Yea I know you aren’t a technical person but you don’t need to be. Here are some easy ways any non-tech person can make sure their technical seo issues are taken care of by simply using notepad and text files.

.htaccess file
Love .htaccess files, don’t fear them. They can help you do really cool stuff.   .htaccess files are text files that simply have a weird filename of “.htaccess”. I don’t know why they have no characters to the left of the (.) but they don’t. I do know my desktop computer doesn’t like naming files that way so I name them 1.htaccess and then use my ftp program to rename them “.htaccess” once I have uploaded the file.

#1 – Deal with Canonical issues (non www. auto redirect into www.)
It generally is best to only have all of your pages appear on your site with www. or without www. in the url. This will avoid duplicate content issues. Honestly I think accidental duplicate content on your own site is generally not a big concern. I do worry alot about difussing my link popularity. Link popularity is vital to search engine rankings. I want all my links pointing to one version and not to have the value divided across two version (non www. and www). If you want your content to always automatically redirect to the www. version simply add this and of course change the domain to your own.
~~~~copy below this line~~~
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
~~~~stop copying~~~

#2 – 301 & 302 Redirects (automatically move visitors to where you want them)
Do you have a ton of backlinks pointing to a page that you deleted? You don’t need to lose that link popularity. Simply use a 301 redirect to have your web hosting computer automatically redirect your visitors browsers to the new location. 301 redirect are called permanent redirect and the search engines will transfer the link popularity. 302 redirects are for temporary redirects and will not have the same link popularity benefits. In other words use 301 and avoid 302 if you want link popularity. To add a 301 redirect just add this code to the .htaccess text file.
~~~~copy below this line~~~
redirect 301 /oldlocation http://www.newlocation.com/page1.html
redirect 301 /oldlocation2 http://www.newlocation.com/page2.html
redirect 301 /oldlocation3 http://www.newlocation.com/page3.html
~~~~stop copying~~~

Robots.txt File
This is a text file that actually uses the .txt file extenstion. Oh my how refreshing! You are so gonna rock this

#1 – Keep it simple whenever possible
You don’t even need a robots.txt file. If you don’t have one the search engines won’t be blocked from any of your content. I would suggest you at least upload a blank robots.txt file just to avoid having a ton of 404 file not found errors. You can do alot of cool things with robots.txt but many of those cool things are not officially part of the robots.txt protocol and thus will not be supported by all search engines. The most common cool thing is the wildcard feature. Using wildcards aka pattern matching in your robots.txt allows you to block files that containing a matching string of text. Google, Bing and Yahoo support it but many smaller bots don’t support it.

#2 – Touch it once, verify it twice
If you are gonna try to do anything fancy or for that matter anytime you upload a robots.txt VERIFY IT. Google has a free robots.txt validator that you can use in their webmaster central area. I can’t count how many times people have uploaded an untested robots.txt that had a typo which prevented the search engines from crawling their site and thus prevented their site from ranking in the search engine results. Don’t be lazy, be careful and always test your robots.txt after every time you touch it.

Log File
#1 – Make sure every domain is maintaining a log file of all activity.
Some cheaper hosts do not automatically turn this on. If you do not see a log file (it is basically just a text file) then ask your host to make sure it is on. I would recommend you have your log file save as much information as possible. I would strongly suggest you archive them. In case you ever have a really big SEO issue your log file will be able to provide great clues and insights that may help to solve the issue. You may not be able to make sense of all the data in the log file but you can send the file to an expert who will be able to analyze it for you. If you have no log file you have nothing to give to the expert.

#2 – Non-tech people may be scared when dealing with log files. Relax, its just a text file.
I’m sure you have used notepad before. Take a deep breath and start feeling confident because you should feel confident with dealing with a simple text file. Using notepad (or whatever program you prefer) search the log file for “301” redirects by simply searching for the number 301 (i told you it would be easy). Make sure you don’t have a 301 pointing to another 301, that just aint good for your link juice. Also search for “302” redirects and strongly consider switching them to 301 redirects. Search for 404 file not found errors. Those 404 errors could be leaking link juice so either upload the missing file or turn it into a 301 redirect.

Technical SEO is only intimidating if you let it be. Be confident and go do some great techincal SEO with your notepad program. This will help you to better understand the situation when you need to deal with the more serious technical issues that do require a Phd. If you ever find yourself in that position go ask Vanessa to help point you in the right direction.

Backlinks are critical to good search engine rankings.  If you don’t think so, stop reading right now and find me a profitable keyword that has a website ranking with no backlinks.    For everyone else that already knows backlinks are important to get your great content ranking in the search engines I’ll continue writing my poor excuse for a blog post.

How do you find the best backlinks for your website while avoiding the bad poisoned links?  Its called link intelligence.  If you are cheap like me you have probably only used the free backlink searches provided by the search engines.  In case you just came out of a coma Google backlink searches are worthless (Google intentionally degrades the data past the point of usefulness).  Google Webmaster Central offers decent information but only for domains you control which is not very helpful to any smart webmaster.  Yahoo however still offers usable link intelligence for the entire internet with Yahoo Site Explorer.

There are two pay-to-play link intelligence services – Linkscape from SEOMoz and Majestic SEO.  Since I am a glutton for punishment I have used my own money to test these two pay services to compare them against the free information Yahoo Site Explorer.

How Did I Test This?

I selected 9 websites that I felt would represent most webmasters.

• willsandtrustslaw.com – Local California Lawyer
• bigmexpress.com – Local New York City Fishing Boat
• schools.nyc.gov – Government Site for 1 million NYC Schoolkids
• multiplemyeloma.org – National Charity Website
• americanprisonconsultants.com – Small Consulting Business
• milliondollarhomepage.com – Viral Success Story
• seomoz.org – Established SEO Resource & Smackdown Contestant
• majesticseo.com – Newer SEO Resource & Smackdown Contestant

I ran reports on these nine websites during the month of August 2009.  It quickly became apparent that Yahoo Site Explorer, SEOMoz LinkScape & Majestic SEO do provide link intelligence but each is unique and has its own flavor.  It is a little hard to compare them to each other since they each provide slightly different data points.

Disclaimer – I personally know people at SEOMoz & Majestic.  They are nice, smart people and both companies have provided me with temporary testing accounts in the past.

Factor #1 – PRICE

Many people wouldn’t start talking price as the first factor because they aren’t cheap like me or always thinking about the return on investment.  Yahoo Site Explorer is free so it is wins the price comparison!

SEOmoz charges between $80 (up to 20 domains) and $230 (up to 125 domains) a month. If you sign up for a year you can save 20% of your membership cost. Based on my experiment with these 9 websites I found that SEOmoz cost less than Majestic. SEOmoz also has their own checkout process and credit card processing.

Majestic charges based on how much data they have for each domain & how often you want it updated (1 week up to 1 year).  The more data they have and the more updates you want, the more credits it will cost you. Each credit is one English pound (about $1.50) and they do offer bulk discounts up to 30% off. If I had wanted to see Google’s backlinks I would have needed 600 credits. Majestic is charging in English Pounds so you may have to pay a finance charge on American credit cards or VAT with European credit cards. If you are researching sites with less than 1,000 domains linking to them, then Majestic will probably be much cheaper. (ps Majestic currently uses Paypal for their checkout process). Below are the costs for 1 week updates of the nine urls I tested.

• willsandtrustslaw.com 137 linking domains – 0.50 credits
• bigmexpress.com 175 linking domains – 0.50 credits
• schools.nyc.gov 8,740 linking domains – 20 credits
• multiplemyeloma.org 5,313 linking domains – 3 credits
• americanprisonconsultants.com181 linking domains – 0.50 credits
• milliondollarhomepage.com20,201 linking domains – 25 credits
• seomoz.org 32,096 linking domains – 40 credits
• majesticseo.com 247 linking domains – 0.50 credits

Factor #2 – QUANTITY OF DATA

Majestic SEO had more than 600% data of live backlinks for the nine websites I tested when compared to SEOMoz. Your exact mileage will vary but I expect 95% of the time Majestic SEO will have more data than SEOmoz Linkscape. I am sure Yahoo Site Explorer has more data than both Majestic and Linkscape. Unfortunately Yahoo’s display limitation of 1,000 backlinks prevents them from ever winning in a size contest unless you are looking at websites with less than 1,000 links.

Majestic SEO captures and retains data on deleted links and redirected links. I couldn’t find this data in Linkscape. Since some people don’t care about deleted links and links that don’t boost search engine rankings I did not include that data in determining the size of the dataset.

I also noticed that a significant amount of the backlinks Majestic SEO reports that SEOMoz Linkscape did not report were from scraper websites and other very low quality websites. This made me feel slightly less impressed with Majestic’s huge size advantage but still very impressed.

Factor #3 – QUALITY OF DATA

It is hard to judge the quality of data especially when there are tens of thousands of links to compare. To help make this decision I decided to look at the top 5 backlinks from each source. SEOMoz Linkscape and Majestic SEO make this easy to find. For Yahoo I manually pulled out some backlinks from the first page of results. I then compared the pagerank, number of other links, and my gut feeling about the quality of each backlink.

In my opinion SEOMoz and Majestic tie for quality of backlinks. Neither of them are perfect but both of them are much better than what is publicly available from the search engines. Looking at the top backlinks for MultipleMyeloma.org, SEOMoz ranks the CharityWatch.org backlink at #8 but ranks Zentrickster at #1 which I feel is a questionable call coming from them. Majestic ranked most sites very well but they had a handful of false positive backlinks which is probably related to the timeliness issue (keep reading for more about this).

The issue of whose data quality is better could easily be debated with many, many good points for both Majestic SEO and SEOMoz’s Linkscape. Since they are both more than good enough and definitely better than what the search engines publicly provide I am calling it a tie and gonna move on.

Factor #4 – TIMELINESS OF DATA

Yahoo wins hands down. They update their search index everyday and have way more crawling power than either Linkscape or Majestic. I’m not sure exactly how often Site Explorer is updated but it seems more current than Majestic and Linkscape. If you want to see the first sign of a backlink being discovered then use Yahoo. If you don’t mind waiting up to a few weeks for a new backlink to be discovered then use Linkscape or Majestic (which is what I do).

A common issue with both Majestic and Linkscape is that sometimes they will report false positives because they haven’t revisited the page so their link reports could be slightly out of date. This seems to mostly impact websites that constantly add and remove backlinks on a daily basis (like the front page of digg.com). From my point of view this is not a big issue since most of the time you are looking for permanent links. There are not many reasons to need real time link intelligence. Also I think this will become less of an issue for both companies as they continue to expand their crawling resources and their recrawl rate improves.

In case you are wondering about the report processing time – it is fast regardless who you use. Yahoo immediately returns data when you request it. Linkscape and Majestic take literally just a few seconds to retrieve the report for any domain you request.

Factor #5 – USABILITY

The best data is useless if it is not east to access and understand. Yahoo shows little data so it is easy to have good usability. Linkscape comes in second place because there is a tiny learning curve to understanding all the information they display and the options you have for sorting.

Majestic is not terrible but it definitely deserves third place in the usability category. They provide so much information, options and countless ways to play around with the data that is honestly overwhelming. Imagine trying to drink from a firehose. I get the feeling a very smart programmer designed it to be as powerful as possible and forgot to ask for a designer to lend a guiding hand. This will probably get improved since they recently started making their website prettier.

Factor #6 – EXTRA ITEMS

I don’t want to write an ebook about this so I am just gonna spout off a list of extra items to consider.

SEOMoz provides free archive access to old reports. Majestic SEO made me pay. If you use Majestic make sure to download all the data for archival purposes.

You may have some problems recreating my backlink counts on Majestic SEO since I used some of their filters. Majestic is like a stick shift car – not as easy to use but if you want to drive a Ferrari you better learn to drive stick shift.

SEOMoz does one of the best jobs of analyzing links in the entire industry. Their MozRank and MozTrust are as good as you are going to find publicly available.

Since Majestic SEO provides reporting on deleted and no longer existing backlinks you could use it to reverse engineer a drop in traffic, rankings or maybe even some penalties.

SEOMoz includes a bunch of other tools and benefits for your monthly membership.

Whenever I beta tested and found bugs both SEOMoz and Majestic were quick to fix them. I have never had a problem or heard of a customer service problem with either company.

Factor #7 – WHAT THEY SAY

I have provided both Majestic SEO & SEOMoz Linkscape Team to preview this review so they could include their words of wisdom (and also make sure I didn’t totally misuse their tools).

Majestic Said:

I’m happy to be equated to a Ferrari that needs a stick shift!

In terms of price, we give all data on domains you control free of charge at the moment. What’s more, we provide more free stuff than Yahoo, including the ability to compare the back link history of up to five domains. This is very cool and I think unique.

Does Yahoo has more data than majestic’s back link data? We are not so sure. We started crawling four years ago and we think we have more link data than Yahoo and we are catching up with Google. We see part of our business being at an enterprise level, with big players building applications on top of an Enterprise level Link API.

This mass of data also affects out indexing updates (freshness) is indeed our greatest challenge at the moment. Expect an update very soon, but also know that we are working on this issue.

Cheers, Dixon Jones.

SEOMoz Said:

The data we provide in our tools is almost always a contextually selected subset of the data in our index. We’re trying to provide only the most relevant, actionable, and up-to-date information to our users. This means that in each context, we are going to exclude some data we think isn’t adding extra value.

Our focus since launch nine months ago has been providing the most important data to users. As you point out, we’re working hard to exclude scrapers and duplicate data, although we believe there is an overwhelming amount of these. Over the next six months we’ll take that expertise in quality and scale up.

Consider a couple of other Linkscape powered tools. These tools provide very specific, actionable information:

Comparing Link Profiles:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-index-update-visualize-data

Competitive Link Finder:

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

We do offer a much more comprehensive, deeper data service for partners. Information can be found at:

http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape#custom-reports

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/.

–Nick Gerner

My personal preference is Majestic SEO. They provide more data including deleted backlinks and they are cheaper for less competitive industries. Since I am serious about making profit online I also use Linkscape since it does a much better job estimating link juice and trust. Linkscape is a much better bargain for highly competitive keywords with huge amounts of backlink data. I strongly encourage you to try both of these services.

Using the data from Majestic & Linkscape I have boosted the rankings for several of my websites. The data even helped me find a website that I was able to get a banner ad on and now that website is a top referrer to one of my websites. I have made a good profit from both of these services.

This is a no-brainer. How much money would you gain if your website climbed one spot in the rankings? If you can gain more than $100 a month then sign up for Majestic SEO and/or Linkscape. If you can’t make a profit with this data you may want to rethink your future in SEO.

Despite Google saying all paid links are bad there are several allowable paid links…

Yahoo Directory

Any directory that is #1 run by human editors, #2 you have a good chance of not being approved #3 has a relevant category, and #4 is a well established site is a good directory to pay for a submission. Technically you are paying and may get a link in return but Google does not consider this a bad paid link (according to Matt Cutts, Google Engineer).  That is because these links  rely on editorial review to ensure only quality relevant sites are listed.  99% of directories do not fall into this category and should be avoided.  For the 1% of directories you should pay to submit your site.  You’ll even get some small direct traffic.  It won’t be alot of direct traffic but it will probably still be cheaper than PPC traffic.

Give Away a Prize

Connect with your niche industry and give away a really cool prize for a good reason.  Linking to your website is not a good reason, that is simply bribery.  You are trying to generate a buzz that will then entice webmasters to write about your prize or contest on their site and thus gain you an editorial link.  For an example if you are a local florist you could run a Mother’s Day essay contest about why their mom deserves free flowers .  You will gain many interesting essays that you can post on your site (good content) and interest from your local newspaper and bloggers which will probably link to you.  All that this contest would have cost is a little time to manage the contest and a floral arrangement.

Provide Free Content

Webmasters are always looking to add relevant, quality content to their website to improve the user experience.  If you have good information that you can share then consider helping them and helping yourself.  How are you helping yourself?  By including a byline in the free article you generate a link back to your website.  If you create a poor article no one will read it and the webmaster will no longer host it on their site.  You need to make a really good article besides you want to take pride in your online reputation.  If you are a gun store think about writing articles about how to properly clean guns and offer them to hunting websites.  That way your informative article gets in front of a related audience that has a good chance of sending you some direct traffic.  You may think this is a free link but remember it is not cheap to generate high quality content.  This is definitely a link you are paying for.

Send Bloggers Free Samples

This might be considered bribery but even Google does it.  Make sure your intent is not to bribe but instead to better connect with relevant industry players.  Bribery will result in negative press (which will still generate links so its not all bad).  I am not advocating you mass mail free stuff to every blogger on the planet.  I am talking about picking the people that are informed and vocal in your industry.  By providing them free samples of your latest products you open a great channel to receive feedback.  If your new product is good then the blogger/developer/newspaper writer/forum moderator will be happy to report on your product.  It is smart business to better connect with people in your niche industry.  This is not cheap (just ask Google) but if you pick the right audience you should see a positive return on your investment.

Killer Blog Content

If you generate amazing content you will be rewarded by people referring to and linking to your website.  Years ago Bruce Clay created the search engine relationship chart that internet marketers religiously downloaded whenever it was updated.  More recent examples of great content can be found on Digg, Sphinn and other social sites.  Not every bit of content you produce will be rewarded with industry buzz and backlinks.  If you consistently produce above average and interesting content you will see people refer to you when they write or add you to their blogroll.  Be careful to not publish over the top tabloid stories.   You may be rewarded with many short term links <cough>13 yr old hires hooker</cough> but will probably upset alot of people in the long term.  Play it safe and avoid the Jerry Springer stories and focus on develop a real following of readers.  If your content is good enough to generate a following of readers it will definitely be good enough to gain links.

Quality Press Releases

Did you know that newspaper writers are constantly under pressure to produce interesting articles.  They are always seeking ideas and yes they do look at press releases.  Sometimes they even republish press releases with only minor changes.  Before you think that any press release will be successful you should take a reality check.  You need to have something important to say in press release for it to get any love.  If you do have an interesting story or ground breaking invention then definitely shout it from the roof top and use press releases to help spread the word.  A well written press release can help expose your company and gain interviews, contacts for future news articles and if you are really lucky getting your story syndicated in the national Associated Press feed.  You are more likely to be hit by lightning then get your story republished by the AP.  However a really interesting press release can generate alot of publicity that will bring in links and direct traffic.

Hire a Link Staff

In case you forgot what I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post let me remind you that good links=higher rankings.  You should be taking links very seriously and develop your own link development staff.  A good link developer can pick out the quality links from the garbage links you should avoid.  Once they identify good quality link partners they can then contact them and facilitate a link to your site.  It is not easy but it is important if you want your website to rank well.  A good link developer is worth their weight in gold.  If for nothing else an educated link developer will help you to avoid the many minefields there are, ranging from the obvious mistake of paying cash for a text link ad on a banned porn site to the less obvious mistake of having a glitch in a robots.txt file.

I didn’t bore you to death yet?  Lets wrap it up

Paying for link popularity has been happening since the first days of the internet.  You pay for your domain name and without a domain name someone can’t link to you.  What has changed is the amount and method people are paying for links.  As these examples show many of the more acceptable ways to generate links also generate direct traffic to your site.  That is not a coincidence.  The search engines work everyday to increase their sophistication to maximize relevancy in the search results.  They try very hard to distinguish editorially reviewed links from plain old advertising.  Think about how you can have people give you editorially reviewed links on quality websites and you will finding ways to improve your long term link popularity.

For most people they will get the best bang for the buck if they develop a strong relevant website and market it accordingly.  If you want to venture on the more riskier side, you can still be profitable (even obscenely profitable) but I suggest you use a domain that won’t make you cry if it is banned from the search engines and that you research the risks you are undertaking.

Excuse me, did you think a wordpress blog is free?  Besides paying the obvious cost of registering a domain and monthly hosting there are big costs associated with any blog.  You need to spend considerable time working and writing on the blog.  Time is money especially for a internet consultants that charge by the hour and for affiliate marketers that need as much time as possible to  build out their network of sites. 

A blog also goes along way to defining your brand and reputation.  A crappy blog will scare away potential business.  So smart people will invest $$$ into an impressive design full of cool website tricks.  Having an impressive design makes you look more impressive and attract more buisiness.  Yes, I know its stupid that when people see someone else’s good design work they think you are smart.  You should never underestimate public stupidity how else can you explain the countless so called SEO experts with flash only websites.

Since blogs cost so much time and money lets look at some possible reasons why I am blogging again:

Make Money Selling Blog Advertising – I like  money, ALOT.  I would love if I could make money with a blog.  This sounds like a great idea until you remember that we are in a recession and that it is easier to find a nymphomaniac swedish bikini model than it is to find someone willing to spend  money advertising.

I’m an Attention Whore – Look at me, look at me, puh-lease look at me.  I would love to be a famous celebrity with people buying me drinks wherever I go.  I learned along time ago I was not born with the celebrity gene.  My mother cringes when she looks at me.  When my wife needs help falling asleep she asks me to tell an interesting story and guaranteed she will zonk out in seconds.  So much for having any chance of gaining a cult following.

Combating Boredom –  This sounds like a possible contender.  I have been working very hard to successfully increase traffic on my sites only to still see the profits fall (granted they are falling alot less than if I did nothing).  I hate this recession.  Companies aint advertising and consumers aint buying like they used to.

I guess I will use boredom as my excuse to why I am starting to blog again.  Since I am bored what will inspire me to blog?  Should I start highlighting the bargains and scams in internet marketing?  Maybe I’ll interview my friends and share the details of what is in their tool boxes that allows them to be so succesful? I could go with a cliche mud slinging fight.  We’ll see what inspires real soon…

ps since i have not maintained my blog for a very long time there are many things not optimized or even working properly.  hopefully i’ll find time to addess those issues over the next few weeks.