Linkscape vs Majestic

Who has the best back link data in the world today? Discounting Yahoo, there are only two world class systems being developed that I can see. They are Majestic – which has been quietly link walking since 2004 and is only now revealing its hand, and Linkscape – probably the most well known in the US – which has had considerable investment from the Rand Foundation (SEOMoz).

I’ve been impressed with both and thought it was time to really put both systems through the test. Which one is better and which one is priced right?

To clarify – I am looking at the PAID versions of both systems. I covered the following areas:

• Index Size
• General Look and Feel
• Manipulating data
• Pricing
• Global reach

Index Size

Both sides could shout about the size of their index. Indeed – Majestic certainly is, claiming that they now have 539 billion urls indexed – which they say compares to only 170 billion indexed by Yahoo and only 38 billion indexed by Linkscape. In fact Linkscape’s Meta Description puts their own number higher at 54 Billion+, but even at this level, Majestic’s data (if true) is 10 TIMES the size of Linkscape’s at the moment and about half the size of Google’s. So let’s test this with a few examples – from popular to unknown
Small site test: http://swanh.org/ (Software association of New Hampshire)

I chose this one for several reasons. The first is that I have never heard of them. I just went through the DMoz directory randomly starting with a state I’ve never been to. The second reason is that they 301 the www onto the non www so will avoid a potential flaw in results. Third, the site does not have an architecture that is built upon multiple subdomains.

Majestic found:  5,127 external back-links from 882 referring domains. with 229 unique anchor texts.
Linkscape found: 25 external links from 6 domains & subdomains. Linkscape only shows the top 50 anchor texts in this report.

Well on this basis – Majestic is absolutely crucifying Linkscape – but let’s be careful… Majestic may be giving so much data that we are not comparing like with like.

Big Site Test: http://BBC.co.uk (The UK’s most well known news brand)

Large sites will be especially interesting to compare because they tend to have many subdomains (like http://news.bbc.co.uk) I tried to find a big site without significan subdomains, but even Wikipedia uses them for language, so I think we need to accept that any link analysis tool needs to cope with subdomains. So what did we find with the BBC?

SEOMoz found:  16,424,105 links from 315,686 domains/subdomains
Majestic found:  345,383,557 links from 598,475 domains.

Again, Majestic shows considerably more backlinks. Majestic;s data, though, includes 23 million image links, 22 million nofollow links, 1 million, 15 million DELETED and 2.9 million mentions (links in plain text, without a hyperlink). On the other hand, SEOMoz’s number appears to count subdomains as seprate domains, instead of limiting their advertised number to the number of Top Level Domains (TLDs).

If we take all of Majestic’s deleted domains out, and even if SEOMoz’s data had already excluded these, (which it doesn’t) then I think we can safely say that Majestic’s index is considerably more developed than Linkscape’s at the moment.

How can Majestic’s Index be so much larger? Majestic started indexing in 2004. That’s a lot of crawling time that Linkscape needs to catch up on. In addition, Majestic’s method of collecting data was ingenious – using distributed crawlers, similar to the bit torrent idea of using multiple partners to use their spare computer downtime to crawl the web. This has given Majestic considerable processing power at a relatively low cost.

General Look and Feel

Majestic’s hands down win on the index size is entirely reversed when it comes to Linkscape’s considerably better “look and feel”. Linkscape looks usable – whilst Majestic looks like it is built by a techie who never quite got around to thinking about it all from the user’s point of view.

Linkscape lays the data out logically, with a dashboard containing the most important information readily displayed and intuitive tabs to drill down to the referring domains or the URL anchor text. When you delve into the “links to domain” tab, SEOMoz lets you filter the result on the fly. This is an especially nice feature. For example, you can easily hide or include particular types of links. To do this with Majestic, you need to go right back to the options menu and force a new analysis of the data. You can get the same sorts of data, but it just takes more effort in Majestic and looks better in Linkscape.

By comparison – Majestic tries to display Top anchors, top referring domains and top pages all on the same page, offering a drill down on each table. It’s all too much data for a single screen. This has now also been augmented with some new graphs – which are nice… but MORE DATA! I also think people will be confused between the two graphs on this dashboard – entitled: “External backlinks discovery for domain.com” and “Referring domains discovery for domain.com”. I know the difference – but I guess you’ll have to look twice… and I would prefer if these defaulted to cumulative graphs.

Manipulating Data

The thing that strikes me between the two systems is that Linkscape only gives you detailed data about the 50 most common anchor text phrases, and the 50 most important links. Looking at www.swanh.org as my example, I also found that all the most important links were internal! Now that may be – but if I want internal link data I can use Xenu Link Sleuth… it’s external data that I want – and by comparison, Majestic gave me so much that I immediately need to start filtering out what I feel may not be appropriate.
Majestic gives 200 results to SEOMoz’s 50 per page on the screen. You can drill down to up to 3,000 l of SEOMoz’s results, page by page – but this makes it hard to extract the data.

On both systems, you can export the data to a CSV file and then you get the whole lot! This is incredibly powerful, except that Linkscape limites their data to just under 3,000 URLs, whilst Majestic gives you the complete data dump if you want it all. There is, however, a considerable learning curve here for using Majestic. To get the data you REALLY want, you need to manipulate the “options” and then force a new analysis… THEN you need to download the data into a CSV. That gives you vastly superior information than SEOMOz, but it does take a while to be able to see the data from different perspectives.

Majestic also has some useful tools for power users. You can, for example, group your different accounts (SEOMoz calls them reports) into sub-folders. SEMoz let’s you compare two competitors side by side, but Majestic’s folders allow you to compare a whole industry sector if you had enough funds to collect all the data.

Pricing

I am not going to go into pricing for the real high end users, who may be spending several thousand every month to use the data. For mere mortals, the pricing models are very different.

Comparing the prices is like comparing apples and oranges.

Linkscape is part of my SEOMoz Gold membership. That start from 25 reports a month for about $80. When I run a report, I get the data for that domain, at that point in time. I get to keep it for as long as I want provided I remain a member of SEMoz. By contrast, on Majestic, I buy access to a domain’s data, for a given amount of time – from 7 days upwards.

Majestic similarly uses a “credits” system to get around the international issues, but the price of a domain can vary dramatically. In the examples I used, Swanh.org cost just a couple of credits, whilst analysing the BBC would cost 600 credits for seven days access (or 3000 for a year’s).

So which is cheaper actually depends on what sites you are analyzing and how you are using the system. If you only have $20 though… you probably only have Majestic as an option.

Functionality

Both systems are function rich and I probably have missed a few. If either Linkscape or Majestic think I’ve missed a trick here, they both know how to contact me and I will correct the table below – but only for functions available at the date of posting.

Summary

Linkscape is considerably more intuitive at the present time, but here is much more depth of data at Majestic and for professionals, the leaning curve will be worth the effort. By contrast, though, SEOMoz has a huge variety of other tools available within its membership fee which you will still need for Internet Marketing even if you do go for Majestic.