Linkscape: Reverse Engineering the Search Engines
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Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could pore over all of the information the search engines have? Thanks to a new tool from SEOmoz, you may get to do just that. Keep reading for a review of this unprecedented new source of information for link analysis.
Index of 30 Billion Pages for Link Analysis Data from SEO Moz
I am very hyped about a new link analysis tool from SEO Moz - Linkscape.
Announced October 6th, 2008, Linkscape is truly set to revolutionize competitive link intelligence and search engine optimization game. It has a 30 billion index of pages and includes link metrics such as page rank, trust rank, anchor text analysis, embedded image links, links from the same IP C-block, external link data, internal link data, domain level rank, domain level trust and TONs of other sexy SEO metrics.
Reverse Engineering the Search Engines
The problem with current link analysis is that it's very limited. Google's "link:" command is distorted on purpose to keep Google's index clean of spam and Yahoo's Site Explorer does not show any link metrics.
SEO Moz set out to fix this. By deploying its own web crawler, Linkscape copies pages it crawls to the index, where various algorithms are applied to analyze and compute collected data, just like the major search engines.
Algorithms used in Linkscape are basically copies of those used by Google, Yahoo and MSN:
mozRank (Google Page Rank, Yahoo! WebRank, Live StaticRank)
mozTrust (Google Trust Rank)
External mozRank
Domain-Level mozRank
Domain Juice
External Domain Juice
mozTrust
I give a more detailed explanation of each attribute in the next section.
Currently Linkscape has an index of 30 billion web pages. Rand explains that the company is focused on getting every domain possible as opposed to crawling every URL on the web. Over time, he says, "we hope to do both."
Rand also shared that, according to their estimates, their index size is around 1/3 to 1/5 that of major search engines, which is to be expected. "Fortunately, it appears that nearly universally, the SEO Moz index contains the more important, well-linked-to pages and sites, so the missing portions in a comparison are unlikely to be popular, valuable resources."
View Linkscape Comic
Next: Linkscape Metrics and Data >>
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